Famous Personalities 1973

Michael Madhusudan Dutt, or Michael Madhusudan Dutta  (25 January 1824 – 29 June 1873) was a popular 19th-century Bengali poet and dramatist. He was born in Sagordari, on the bank of Kopotaksho, a village in Keshabpur Upazila, Jessore District, Bengal Presidency, East Bengal (now in Bangladesh). His father was Rajnarayan Dutt, an eminent lawyer, and his mother was Jahnabi Devi. He was a pioneer of Bengali drama. His famous work Meghnad Bodh Kavya, is a tragic epic. It consists of nine cantos and is exceptional in Bengali literature both in terms of style and content. He also wrote poems about the sorrows and afflictions of love as spoken by women.

Pandit Vishnu Digambar Paluskar (August 18, 1872 – August 21, 1931) was a Hindustani musician. He sang the original version of the bhajan Raghupati Raghava Raja Ram, and founded the Gandharva Mahavidyalaya in 1901. His original surname was Gadgil, but as they hailed from the village Palus (near Sangli), they came to be known as the "Paluskar" family.

Centenary of the Discovery of Leprosy Bacillus. Gerhard Henrik Armauer Hansen (29 July 1841 – 12 February 1912) was a Norwegian physician, remembered for his identification of the bacterium Mycobacterium leprae in 1873 as the causative agent of leprosy.

Hansen was born in Bergen and studied medicine at the Royal Frederik's University (now the University of Oslo), gaining his degree in 1866. He served a brief internship at the National Hospital in Christiania (Oslo) and as a doctor in Lofoten. In 1868 Hansen returned to Bergen to study leprosy while working with Daniel Cornelius Danielssen, a noted expert.

Leprosy was regarded as largely hereditary or otherwise miasmic in origin. Hansen concluded on the basis of epidemiological studies that leprosy was a specific disease with a specific cause. In 1870–71 Hansen travelled to Bonn and Vienna to gain the training necessary for him to prove his hypothesis. In 1873, he announced the discovery ofMycobacterium leprae in the tissues of all sufferers, although he did not identify them as bacteria, and received little support. The discovery was done with a "new and better" microscope.

Nicolaus Copernicus  (19 February 1473 – 24 May 1543) was a Renaissance mathematician and astronomer who formulated a model of the universe that placed the Sun rather than the Earth at its center. The publication of this model in his book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres) just before his death in 1543 is considered a major event in the history of science, triggering the Copernican Revolution and making an important contribution to the Scientific Revolution.

Copernicus was born and died in Royal Prussia, a region that had been a part of the Kingdom of Poland since 1466. He was a polyglot and polymath, obtaining a doctorate in canon law and also practising as a physician, classics scholar, translator, governor, diplomat and economist. In 1517, he derived aquantity theory of money – a key concept in economics – and, in 1519, formulated a version of what later became known as Gresham's law.