Pedro L. Mangabeira Albernaz

I had finished my Master’s Degree thesis, at Washington University in Saint Louis, which was on histochemistry of the cochlea, and the most important finding was the presence of acid mucopolysaccharides in the vicinity of the distal ends of the internal and external cochlear hair cells following noise exposure. Dr. Walter Covell, my advisor, and I went several times to the illustration department of the WUSL Medical School and tried all sorts of tricks and all types of filters. We could not show these findings in a black and white picture. I asked Dr Covell if it would be possible to include a color picture.  He did not know, but told me that he had never seen a color picture in a Medical journal. The office of the Laryngoscope, which was edited by Dr. Theo Walsh, was next to Dr. Covell’s office at the McMillan Hospital, so we went there to check. They did not know, either, but they would check with the printers. The printers said that it would be possible to print a separat...

(History of Medicine ... 4) Avicenna – the Latin name of Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn Abd- Allah ibn Sina – was a Persian physician, who lived from 980 to 1037. In those days the amount of available information was more limited, which made it possible to acquire a very diversified range of knowledge. Besides being a physician, Avicenna was astronomer, chemist, geologist, psychologist, Islamic theologian and scholar, paleontologist, mathematician, physicist and poet. He wrote extensively. Forty of his books that were not lost are related to Medicine. The most famous are The Book of Healing, a scientific encyclopedia, and The Canon of Medicine, a complete textbook based on the principles of Galen and Hippocrates. The Canon of Medicine was used as a text book in the universities of Montpellier and Louvain until 1650. Among Avicenna’s “firsts”: •    The discovery of contagious and sexually transmitted diseases. •    The introduction of experimental medic...

This is one of my favorite stories. It was told by Erle Stanley Gardner, the man who wrote the Perry Mason books. He had traveled to China and wanted to express his appreciation to the people who received him so well. Since his specialty was writing detective stories, he decided to write a special one as a tribute to China. The detective’s name was Terry Clane. He lived in San Francisco and fell in love with his best friend’s wife. So he decided to run away. Seeing in Chinatown an advertisement that a Chinese Buddhist Monastery was offering free diamonds, he immediately boarded on a boat to China. One day, back in San Francisco, he was dining with a young woman and told her about the diamonds. “Was it true?” she asked. “Yes,” he said. “I saw the diamonds. But I had to stay in the Monastery for three years in order to get them. I had nothing to do, so I stayed there for three years.” “And did you get the diamonds?” “No. They are still there. After my three years in the Monas...

Otosclerosis is a bone disease that affects human temporal bones. An orthopedist, Howard Frost, compared it to a demolition, which contains all of the materials of a house but has no architecture. Normal bone has a precise architecture, otosclerotic bone does not. In about 10 per cent of the patients, otosclerosis  produces a hearing loss due to a fixation of the stapes, that interferes with the transmission of sound from the middle ear to the inner ear. In a smaller percentage of cases there is inner ear hearing loss, related to larger amounts of diseased bone in the cochlea. When I was in Saint Louis I became involved with histochemistry of the cochlea, which was the subject of my Master’s thesis. When Dr. Theo E. Walsh began to do stapedectomies – operations to replace the stapes with a prosthesis in patients with otosclerosis – I asked him to give me the stapes footplates for histochemical studies. The histology of otosclerosis was well known, but it had been studied only i...