Ingredients in Traditional Chinese Medicine
Index Home For Indians, lands beyond the Himalayas were always an enigma. Till the beginning of 20th century, parts of Tibet were still unexplored. While, a couple of Chinese pilgrims did…
Eleven Herbs from High hills in postage stamps
Index Home I grew up in the Himalayas, highest hills in the world. Like all children, we would walk down to the school or run up and down the hills to…
Plant remedies for health in Indian stamps
Index Home Plants are ancient. Evolution of plants began about 400 million years ago. Humans arrived much later on the scene, only about 4-million years ago. Beginning of agriculture and first…
Telecom and health in 1980 and origins of Telemedicine
Index Home About four decades ago, in 1980 there was no public internet (or World Wide Web). While idea of internet (or connected computers) did exist, it started taking shape only…
Angiography: How did we start seeing our vessels
Index Home While we knew for a long time, that blood travels inside conduits or vessels, we did not have much of clarity, till the middle of 16th century. It was…
A Mold that saved the world
Index Home Some discoveries are serendipitous. Born in 1881, medicine was not an initial choice for Alexander Flemming. He initially studied in a polytechnic and later worked in a shipping office…
One stamp one story: Flexible endoscopy
Index Home Need and desire to peep through small holes, to identify and treat human diseases was always there. Challenge was how to make it happen. Real efforts started early in…
Coming out of the disability closet
Index Home It took global community, more than thirty-five years just to come out of their disability closet. Thirty-five years is a gross understatement, as we shift our start-line to 1945,…
A mirror of the past and our wall of shame
Index Home Postage stamps are a mirror of our past. Often, less than a square inch of space, sums up prevalent societal, political, and behavioural norms. Our past perceptions, as well…
Medical services in the sky
Index Home During First World War we began to use airplanes, both as a weapon and as a medical service. In 1917, a British plane evacuated a solder with a broken…