Pedro L. Mangabeira Albernaz

One of the important anatomists of The University of São Paulo, Prof. Olavo Marcondes Calazans, once told me that Anatomy books have many mistakes. This happens because, during his lifetime, an anatomist studies thoroughly only a limited number of subjects. The others he copies from other books. This may help to explain why certain mistakes are sometimes repeated throughout the years. One such example is the tectorial membrane, an important part of the organ of Corti. The section seen in Fig. 1 shows a “floating” tectorial membrane, but this is a fixation artefact. Fig 1. A histological section of the organ of Corti Anderson Hilding performed precise dissections of the organ of Corti in guinea pigs and stated unequivocally that the tectorial membrane is attached both to the limbus spiralis and to Hensen’s cells. He published this in 1953! An yet most of the pictures of the inner ear continue to show a floating tectorial membrane (see Fig. 2). Fig. 2. A drawing of the organ of ...

In Audiology the word masking denotes the presence of a sound that interferes with another. Since we live in a world filled with sounds, there is always some masking when we are talking or listening. In some circumstances there is more masking. A good example is a cocktail party: we may be talking to one person and in the background we hear other people talking, music, waiters clashing dishes, and so on. For audiological tests we use well defined types of noise as masking devices. Most of the masking effects occur in the inner ear, but it can also occur in the central auditory pathways (the route from the inner ear to the brain). During my third and last year in Saint Louis I spent three weeks at the Research Department of the Central Institute for the Deaf, involved in audiological research. I felt that this would somehow complement my years of training and it was a very pleasant experience. Carl Sherrick, an experimental psychologist, was doing some experiments with pulsed stim...

(History of Medicine ... 5) His Hebrew name was Moshe ben-Maimon, in Arabic he was Musa ibn Maymun. In Latin he became Maimonides. He was an important medieval Jewish philosopher, one of the greatest Bible scholars and physicians of the Middle Ages. He was born in Córdoba, Spain, in 1135, and died in Egypt in 1204. He wrote so extensively that Abraham Joshua Heschel, a 20th Century Jewish philosopher, used to say that “if we did not know that Maimonides is the name of a man, we might think it was the name of a university.” When the Almohads conquered Córdoba in 1148 Maimonides’ family escaped to Morocco an then the Holy Land and then Egypt, where he later became the Sultan’s physician. He wrote ten medical books, all published in Arabic. He described many conditions including asthma, diabetes, hepatitis, and pneumonia, and emphasized moderation and a healthy life style. His treatises became influential for many generations of physicians. He knew the Arabic translations of Greek a...

Dashiell Hammett was the creator of the “hard boiled” detective stories. As it often happens with pioneers, the quality of his work was underestimated during his life. Now he is regarded as one of the finest mystery writers of all time. Hammett left school when he was 14 years old and had several jobs: messenger, paper deliverer, night watcher, production foreman, stevedore and industrial machine operator. From 1915 to 1922 he worked for Pinkerton National Detective Agency and it was this job that supplied him many of the ideas that he used as a writer. Hammett had his own code of ethics, that transcended the ordinary laws and rules. A good example of his ethics can be observed at the end of one of his short stories, when the girl who had schemed the criminal operation is unmasked by the detective who tells us everything in the first person and does not even have a name: “No one else knows what you know...”, she said. “There is a wealth in that cellar beneath the garage. You may ...