Summing Up Med-Phys

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Yesterday I suddenly discovered like a simpleton (like all such sudden discoveries of mine) that the progress of my lessons in Physics runs parallel to the progress of medical instrumentation.

My earliest memory is that of the deadly clinical thermometer in my Father's medicine kit. And that lesson was there in my Class IX. Also the first chapter of Saha & Srivastava...their next chapter is Calorimetry and I resented it was not there in Med Phys. But no, there it was in dietitian's jargon...only they don't know that their calorie is a thousand times bigger than ours.

Then our country doc had this stethoscope that he used to dig into my ribs and listen. And that is sound and its propagation in wave guides. And he also had a knee hammer...that is pure mechanics. And my MD Uncle used to ask me to lie down and place his left middle finger on my midriff or abdomen and hit it with his right. And they called it percussion. It is all sound, and good old physicists used to employ it to discover where they buried their bootleg bottles underground.

And the BP kit...it is nothing but manometry that we read in Class X.

And X-ray kits as old as our own Roentgen.

And then there were these eye defects and how to correct them by lenses of all kinds. And that is ray optics. And then there was this microscope to see the worms. I resented that they didn't use telescopes. But later on I found my medico friends in their third year using these to focus on their ladies' hostel. But as I read Physical Optics, I got to know that they use this fantastic thing called Phase Contrast...which got our Zernike his Nobel. And there was also this Young's Eriometer that measures the size of their blood corpuscles by using the Airy Disk that I loved.

And then all those grams...electrocardio, electroencephalo and their cousins. They are nothing but improved versions of the frog leg jerks and a rotating drum{;-} Our own Galvani did it three centuries back when there was no Nobel.

And then came all those hi-fi scans. These are nothing but applications of the Rs 10 worth thyratron we used in our Electronics Lab at AU to generate saw tooth wave forms. And the oscilloscope and sweep circuits in radars. Brain child of one of our own ubiquitous Popovs, rather.

And then the echo-batty things...I mean such as sonography. Just replace penetrating X-rays by reflecting hi-fi sound that we did experiments with in our Final Year at AU.

Today I saw the most interesting kit..Color Doppler kit. Doppler Effect we read in Class XII and it is so nice to see it being used to measure the speed of blood flow in veins...no need to use bulky venturimeters.

And medicine has got really highbrow...we have PET Scans. They shoot positrons at electrons and catch the emitted gamma rays..only thing is that those white-overalled dames manning (womanning) them haven't heard of QED (I mean the Mod Phys stuff).

Ignorance is bliss sometimes...


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