Ever since the “most unlikely” Dutch scientist and pioneering microbiologist Anton van Leeuwenhoek scraped scum from his teeth and observed tiny “animalcules,” or germs, in the plaque samples beneath the first-ever microscope he invented, it bid fair to the presence of the microbial world...
There was a time when modern medicine was primitive. There were no antibiotics, so every infection took its own course, leading to decline in health. Hypertension and diabetes were largely untreatable. X-ray was new, and remedies had changed but little from medieval times. No one ever embarked on...
All that is old need not be dated. Take for instance, our ecological heritage. It has been rightly proposed by scholars that countless enlightened ideas may be drawn from old precepts of previous civilizations, especially from ancient India. More than that, knowledge may also, in today’s...
We live, as Charles Dickens may have verbalized, in the worst — also the most turbulent — of times. It is, however, hard to imagine that the great writer could have visualized the sinister COVID-19 tempest. In the present context, the foremost thing that each of us could do is to make —...
Sir William Osler, a luminary of internal medicine, rightly said that one should treat as many patients as possible with a new drug while it still has the power to heal. This is because there is wisdom in it since most of us would also believe that the medicine prescribed for a given illness will...
