Dibrugarh district personal grant from Dr. John Berry White after he retired as the civil surgeon of Lakhimpur district. The medical school, "John Berry White Medical School" was set up in 1900 at Dibrugarh, and thus this premier institute started its history, and marked a new era in education. Assam Medical College has the pride of having the first Radiology department in India, as in 1910 two X-Ray machine (One 10MA and another 15MA) was bought from England, only 15 years after the discovery of X-Rays by Professor Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen in 1895-96. These two were the first X-Ray machines in India.
Roentgen (unit) Valentine Mayneord and the radiobiologist John Read, published a paper in which a unit of measure, dubbed the ""gram roentgen"" (symbol: gr) defined as "that amount of neutron radiation which produces an increment in energy in unit volume of tissue equal to the increment of energy produced in unit volume of water by one roentgen of radiation" was proposed. This unit was found to be equivalent to 88 ergs in air. In 1953 the ICRU recommended the rad, equal to 100 erg/g, as the new unit of measure of absorbed radiation. The rad was expressed in coherent cgs units. In