Current Science

Ramya Raman ¹, Anantanarayanan Raman ², P. Ram Manohar ³

Affiliations
1 with the Fremantle Hospital (WA–Government Health Service), Fremantle, WA 6160, AU
2 with Charles Sturt University, PO Box 883, Orange, NSW 2800, AU
3 with the AVP Research Foundation, 136–137 Tiruchirapalli Road, Coimbatore 641 045, IN

Abstract

No Abstract.

Full Text

   

Ramya Raman ¹, Anantanarayanan Raman ²

Affiliations
1 Fremantle Hospital (Western Australia Public Health), Fremantle, WA 6160, AU
2 Charles Sturt University, P O Box 883, Orange, NSW 2800, AU

Abstract

No Abstract.

Full Text

   

Ramya Raman ¹, Anantanarayanan Raman ²

Affiliations
1 Fremantle Hospital (WA Government Public-Health Service), Fremantle, WA 6160, AU
2 Charles Sturt University, P.O. Box 883, Orange, NSW 2800, AU

Abstract

No Abstract.

Full Text

   

Ramya Raman ¹, S. Sudha Revathy ², Anantanarayanan Raman ³

Affiliations
1 Princess Margaret Hospital, Perth, WA 6008, AU
2 6, Seventh Main Road, Fourth Avenue, Dhandeeswarar Nagar, Chennai 600 042, IN
3 Charles Sturt University, The Graham Centre for Agricultural Innovation, PO Box 883, Orange, NSW 2800, AU

Abstract

William Shakespeare qualifies saltpetre with the term 'villanous' in Henry IV (Act I, Scene 3, 1598, note 1), because of its then known relevance in gunpowder manufacture.

Full Text

   

Ramya Raman ¹, Anantanarayanan Raman ²

Affiliations
1 Fremantle Hospital, Fremantle, WA 6160, AU
2 Charles Sturt University, PO Box 883, Orange, NSW 2800, AU

Abstract

Indian people hold Azadirachta indica (Rutales: Meliaceae) (nimba, Sanskrit), a native tree, in high veneration. Its cultural connections with the people of the Indian subcontinent are complex and intense1. References to its use exist in Caraka, Susruŧa and Brihat Samhita-s - the ancient Sanskrit medical treatises.

Full Text

   

Ramya Raman ¹, Anantanarayanan Raman ²

Affiliations
1 C. Y. O’Connor Village Medical Centre, Erade Drive, Piarra Waters, WA 6112, AU
2 Charles Sturt University, P. O. Box 883, Orange, NSW 2800, AU

Abstract

Medical stores attached to army hospitals serviced as pharmacies in India until the later decades of the 19th century. Only around the 1920s, independent pharmacies as retail outlets began to appear in India. An army surgeon, Edward Nicholson, in an article published in the Madras Quarterly Journal of Medical Science (1865), while stationed in Cannanore in the erstwhile Presidency of Madras, laments on the poor quality of the army medical stores and how the surgeons were also to function as the compounder–dispenser in army hospitals. In this paper, we have used this Nicholson’s narrative as a trigger to reconstruct the status of army medical stores in British India and the publication of pharmacopoeias (also referred as Materia Medicas) in India by British surgeons in India, such as William O’Shaughnessy and Edward Waring in 1842 and 1868 respectively. The Madras Presidency contributed, in an equally significant measure, to pharmacopoeial knowledge. Mohideen Sheriff, an early graduate of the Madras Medical College (MMC) and who superintended the Triplicane Dispensary for several years, wrote the Materia Medica of Madras. The MMC offered training to medical students in Materia Medica in the 1860s. However, formal training of Chemists and Druggists (= pharmacists) commenced in MMC only between 1870 and 1879. Madras pioneered in establishing the Pharmaceutical Society of India in 1925 – the first established professional body – primarily meant to act as an accreditation society, which was amalgamated with the Indian Pharmaceutical Association functioning in Banares (Varanasi) in 1949.

Full Text

   

Ramya Raman ¹, Anantanarayanan Raman ²

Affiliations
1 School of Medicine, University of Notre Dame Australia, Henry Street, Fremantle, WA 6160, AU
2 Charles Sturt University, P.O. Box 883, Orange, NSW 2800, AU

Abstract

At least 30 years before qualified women doctors from Britain, America and Australia came to India to assist in the health care of women, Mary Ann Dacomb Scharlieb living in Madras (now Chennai) graduated with an LMS (Licentiate in Medicine and Surgery) diploma from the Madras Medical College in 1875. She then proceeded to London to earn an MBBS degree from the newly started Medical School for Women. She returned to Madras after completing advanced training in operative midwifery at the Allgemeines Krankenhaus, Vienna, Austria in 1884. The Government of Madras established a women’s hospital in Moore’s Garden – the Royal Victoria Hospital for Caste and Gosha Women (RVH) – which she superintended from 1884 to 1887; the hospital was shifted to its current location in Triplicane, Chennai in 1890. Doctors in Madras, such as Ida Sophia Scudder and Muthulakshmi Reddy, played a major role in taking women’s health care to new heights. While chronicling the lives and works of pioneer women doctors of Madras, this note also enunciates details of the establishment of premier women’s hospitals in Madras: (1) the Maternity Hospital (MH) in Egmore and (2) the RVH in Triplicane, in the backdrop of an overall context of women’s health management in the rest of India, triggered by the Dufferin Association and its sprigs, the Association of Medical Women in India and Women’s Medical Service for India. The MH, at least four decades older than the RVH, performed remarkably on many a score: for example, in starting of a midwife training school and the Diploma in Gynaecology and Obstetrics programme, the latter setting the trend for the rest of India. The MH pioneered in developing a facility to treat infants and children as well in 1949, thanks to the efforts of pediatrician S. T. Ãchar, thus earning a reputation as the ‘Egmore model’ in medical circles. This note is an appreciation and a token of gratitude to those unforgettable heroines, who worked against odds, including facing resentment and resistance from some Indian men of status and influence.

Full Text

   

Ramya Raman ¹, Anantanarayanan Raman ²

Affiliations
1 School of Medicine, University of Notre Dame, Mouat Street, Fremantle, WA 6160, IN
2 Charles Sturt University & Graham Centre for Agricultural Innovation, P.O. Box 883, Orange, NSW 2800, IN

Abstract

James Annesley from Ireland spent nearly four decades in Madras, first as an assistant and later as a senior surgeon attached to the Madras Medical Establishment. During this span of service he published the book in 1825 on the most prevalent diseases of India comprising a treatise on the epidemic cholera of the East. This paper recounts the epidemiology of cholera and the efforts made to manage it in the Madras Presidency in the 1820s, keeping in view the life of Annesley and the contents of his book.

Full Text

   

Ramya Raman ¹, Anantanarayanan Raman ²

Affiliations
1 School of Medicine, University of Notre Dame, Fremantle, WA 6160, AU
2 Charles Sturt University, PO Box 883, Orange, NSW 2800, AU

Abstract

The first eye hospital, not onlyin India but in the whole of Asia as well, and the second oldest in the world, known as ‘Madras Eye Infirmary’ (MEI) as a public facility was established in Madras city (now Chennai) in 1819 to address the ophthalmic problems of residents of the city and the neighbourhood. Robert Richardson was its first superintendent. Whereas the Madras General Hospital, in the early days of its establishment serviced only the British army personneland civilians, the MEI, right frominception, serviced Indians for reasons unknown. This facility moved around the town during its early days, but settled in its current location in Marshalls Road (now Rukmini Lakşmipati Sãlai), Egmore (Ézhumbûr) in 1886. The MEI changed names over time: ‘Government Ophthalmic Hospital’ (GOH, in 1886), and presently the ‘Regional Institute of Ophthalmology and Government Ophthalmic Hospital’. Local people fondly refer to it as the Ézhumbûr KaṇÃspatiri. Robert Elliot (1904–1913), Henry Kirkpatrick (1914–1920), Robert Wright (1920–1938), K. Koman Nayar (1940–1945) and R. E. S. Muthayya (1947–1956) are significant names in the annals of GOH. Elliott is remembered by ophthalmic surgeons throughout the world for his pioneering surgical-management technique of glaucoma, which involved a novel improvement made over the one proposed by Pierre Félix Lagrange of Bordeaux in 1907. Thisnote recounts the key milestones andscientific landmarks in the pages of the history of this public facility, while referring to the science promoted by the medical men who led this hospital at various times until 1956 and placed it on the world map of medicine.

Full Text

   

Ramya Raman ¹, Anantanarayanan Raman ²

Affiliations
1 University of Notre Dame (School of Medicine), Fremantle, WA 6160, AU
2 Charles Sturt University, PO Box 883, Orange, NSW 2800, AU

Abstract

A printed book, titled ‘Clinical Manual for India: Compiled for the Use of the Students of the Madras Medical College’ (hereafter, ‘MMC Manual’), was available for student use in the Madras Medical College (MMC) between 1878 and 1897. The first edition of this book must have served as casual class notes prepared by Arthur Branfoot, Professor of Midwifery at MMC in 1878. The second and third editions, more formally prepared than the first, were printed books compiled and edited by Charles Sibthorpe, who taught pathology at MMC. The fourth and the last edition was compiled and edited by a team consisting of Branfoot, John Maitland (Surgeon), and John Smyth (Physician), academics at MMC and concurrently, full surgeons at the Madras General Hospital. This Manual, which might have served similar to either a study guide or a handbook, impresses as a unique effort in enabling and empowering the MB&CM and LM&S students at MMC at that time. The book was intended for the use of medical students of MMC only. No book of similar kind existed for students in medical colleges in other Indian presidencies. Here, we briefly examine the contents of the available 1883 (the second) and 1897 (the fourth) editions of the MMC Manual. The fourth (1897) edition strongly resembles James Finlayson’s ‘Clinical Manual for the Study of Medical Cases’ (1891) in contents and design. The ‘Clinical Manual for India’ impresses as a powerful and useful teaching – learning tool, especially of diagnostic medicine, since it includes most of the relevant medical information, in spite of a few weaknesses. Notably it cites some of the then newly published medical journal articles and books.

Full Text