Saint Louis, Missouri (1)


I went to Saint Louis in 1958 and stayed there for three years, as a fellow of the Department of Otolaryngology of  the Washington University School of Medicine.

My activities were divided: twice a week I worked with Dr. Theo E. Walsh in the operating rooms and in his office; in the other three days I worked in my own histopathology lab, from which my first published papers originated, as well as my Master’s degree thesis. For my last year I was appointed Research Assistant in the Department.

The Central Institute for the Deaf, the first oral school for deaf children in the United States, was just a few blocks away, and every Thursday afternoon there was a seminar in the research Building. There I met many prominent scientists.

I will tell you some stories of my times in Saint Louis.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Otology and Neurotology - Past, Present and Future - II

Image
Part II During the 48th Brazilian Congress of Otorhinolaryngology there was a presentation named The Future of Otolaryngology. I decided to include in my list of blogs this slightly expanded version of my presentation. Some of the names mentioned here have been presented in other pages of this blog. Ádám Politzer Politzer is celebrated as a pioneer of modern otology in the History of Medicine. For many years he was the Professor of Otolaryngology of the University of Vienna and attracted many physicians from different countries, influencing and training thousands of otologists from all over the world. He invented many medical instruments for the diagnosis and treatment of ear diseases. He created the ventilation tubes for the aeration of the middle ear after paracentesis and created the otoscope. He made the first observation that the middle ear ossicles vibrate to sound stimuli.  Wladimir Michailowitsch Bechterew An important Russian neurophysiologist, creator of
Read more

Malpighi

Image
Marcello Malpighi was the first anatomist to incorporate the microscope in his studies. Marcello Malpighi - Wikimedia Commons The microscope was invented by Hans Jansen, a Dutch spectacle-maker, in 1590 and was modified by Galileo in 1609. Its possibilities for biological studies, however, came approximately 50 years later, when Robert Hooke improved it. Then Malpighi, Hooke, Nehemiah Grew and Antoine van Leeuwenhoek  began their investigations using the new tool. Hooke studied mainly insects, and was the creator of the word cell for describing biological organisms. Grew was a vegetable anatomist. Leeuwenhoek manufactured many microscopes (of high quality for that time) and actually made important discoveries, such as bacteria   (large Selenomonads from the human mouth), the vacuoles of the cells, the banded pattern of muscular fibers and the spermatozoa (for this discovery he had serious disagreements with the Dutch theologists). Hooke's microscope, employed by Malpighi -
Read more

Jack Urban

Image
This is my first blog for 2016, and once again I want to thank all my readers and wish them a Happy New Year. A little late, isn’t it? But my wishes are sincere. Today I want to honor a friend that died many years ago. His name was Jack Urban. He was an optical and mechanical  engineer. Jack Urban (right) and Charles Graser, one of the first patients to receive a cochlear implant He developed many instruments for the House Medical Group in Los Angeles, including accessories for the surgical microscopes. But Jack was not the type of person from whom you would simply “order” something. He would come to the operating room so that he could understand what the surgeon wanted. And then he would manufacture a prototype and would again enter the operating room to see how it worked and whether he had to make any changes. Today many manufacturers of medical instruments sell “microdebriders,” often called “shavers.” These are instruments designed to cut and suction small bits of tissue
Read more