Reflections

This picture is of Vizzy ( Upper right), Amarnath ( lower right) and Amarnath and probably Merchant coming in to bat. Indian cricket has been no stranger to controversies. In our time we can remember Kapil Dev being dropped from the Calcutta test during the England tour in 1984 allegedly at Gavaskar’s behest, Mohibder Amarnat referring to the selectors as a bunch of jokers and of course the Saurav Ganguly /Greg Chappel imbroglio. However many of us do not know that Indian cricket was mired in controversies frrom its earliest days. One of the earliest omne took place in 1935 duringthe Inidian team’s secondl trip to England. Lala Amarnath or plain Nanik Amarnath as he was known then was sent back in disgrace from the tour even before the first Test was played. Let us set the background. Those were the days of the Raj. Intimations of mortality were evident, but most of the principal beneficieries of Empire were unaware of the fact. The Princes were still the bantam cocks, dancin...

Except for those of us who grew up in the sixties and seventies, Lal Bahadur Shashtri was a figure whom we knew little about. He was the little man with iron in his constitution, the man who succeeded Jawaharlal Nehru, honest to the core, the man who won the 1965 War with Pakistan. He was a man who seldom thrust himself to the stage; most of his work was from the shadows. But his death was anything but quiet. He thrust himself into attention in a way that has now been forgotten, but bears recalling. It was the night of 10/11 January, 1966. The place, the capital of the Uzbek SSR, Tashkent. The previous day had been a hectic one, but one that ended in triumph for this quiet, but steely statesman. President Ayub Khan of Pakistan and he had agreed to the terms which would end the War of 1965 and return conquered territory to their rightful owners. Pakistan’s bid to tie this to the future of Kashmir had been foiled and Prime Minister Kosygin of the then USSR had acted as the honest bro...

Final part of the article He felt the great need of determining the average duration of life in this country and recommended concrete measures for registration of births and marriages.20 He reverted to this subject again in 1867 when he published a paper entitled 'A Clinical Retrospect of Hospital Experience of Civil Medical Cases' dealing with a total of 7,125 indoor patients, 6,662 in the Medical College Hospital and 811 in Chitpore and Baitaconnah Hospitals and the 5,839 out-patients referred to in the earlier report.21 The average mortality in the three hospitals was 24.4 per cent and in the Medical College Hospital alone 22.7 per cent. He noted that for the four years commencing in 1850, the gross mortality rate was 16.45 per cent and for the similar period commencing in 1860, the rate was 25.32 per cent. The major causes of death were cholera, dysentery, smallpox, phthisis, remittent fever and intermittent fever. The death rates were as follows: cholera 46.6, dysentery...

Second Instalment of the article. Dr. Goodeve Chuckerbutty appeared at the first open competitive examination for appointment to the Covenanted service held during 8-11 January 1855. The Medical Times and Gazette published the full reports of this examination on the 10 February 1855. Twenty-two out of the twenty-eight candidates who appeared, passed, and George Marr was the first and S. C. G. Chuckerbutty second in order of merit.* He was now appointed to the Covenanted Medical Service as Assistant Surgeon (24 January 1855), and was the first Indian to win by sheer merit his way into this service that had until then been reserved for Europeans only. On his return to India, he was reappointed Assistant Physician to the Medical College Hospital. Only in view of his long experience in the medical service in India, he was exempted from probationary duty at the General Hospital and with a regiment (Lancet, 1855, i, 620). As an officer of the Covenanted Service, he successively beca...

Reproducing an article written By P C Sengupta and published in 1970 : Med Hist. 1970 April; 14(2): 183–191. The original article is not easily avialble now. I think this very well researched article will be a welcome addition to the series on the Calcutta Medical College in this blog. I will be breaking it up inot a number of instalments. Please also check out here , here , here , here and here . SOORJO COOMAR GOODEVE CHUCKERBUTTY: THE FIRST INDIAN CONTRIBUTOR TO MODERN MEDICAL SCIENCE by P. C. SEN GUPTA AN EDITORiAL note on the Progress of Science appeared in the Medical Times and Gazette, London, in 1852; this reads as follows: 'It is with sincere gratification that we today place before our readers an ably-written communication of considerable interest, by a native of our Indian empire. Dr. Chuckerbutty is, we believe, the irst native of that clime who has contributed to the progress of the science of medicine; and his friends-and he left many in this country-w...

We originate from Baharampur. Whenever we were asked in our younger days (nobody really asks such questions nowadays) “ tomader bari kothay ? “ (which meant “Where does your family originate?” And not as one would think from the literal translations, “Where do you live?” we always answered “Baharampur.” My father was born in Nagpur during my grandfather’s stint there as an official In the Indian Audit and Accounts service, but he was brought up in Baharampur where the family house was. We have grown up with stories of Square field, the Nawab’s palace, the riverside and many others and my father always used to claim that the building of the Krishnanath College where he studies was modeled on one of the dreaming spires of Oxford, I forget which one. Some of my cousins also grew up there; two of my paternal aunt’s sons had their education there as well. We used to visit Baharampur very occasionally. Because of not so often talked about family feuds following the death of my grandfa...

The world of sharks really came to our attention when we saw the movie Jaws. This movie, based on a Peter Benchley novel, sparked a fear of sharks that was real, even for us who lived a safe 100 km from the sea and never swam in anything more dangerous than the Marine Club swimming pool. Sharks have sparked fears, but mainly in Western societies for the past hundred years at least. However the Polynesian and Indian Ocean communities who have lived with sharks for thousands of years had no problems with them during all this while, looking upon them as their ancestors or as protectors of fishermen. Once the Westerners began to encroach on tropical waters as a prelude to their predatory raids on Eastern lands, they began to become familiar with sharks. One of the oldest stories of shark attacks on a Western sailor was recorded in 1580 when a seaman on a ship travelling from Portugal to Goa fell abroad. As recorded ‘There appeared from below the surface of the sea a large monster … it ...