Pedro L. Mangabeira Albernaz

Many years ago I went to Paris, to a meeting organized by Prof. Jean-Marc Sterkers. William House and Ugo Fish were the special guests. The meeting was excellent but still the four of us found many hours to talk about many things, medical and non-medical. In one of the meeting’s sessions Ugo told us about one of his patients, a man who lived in one of the many mountains in Switzerland and had little contact with the big cities. One day this man realized that he had lost most of his hearing in one ear. He knew a  famous sorcerer near his home and went there hoping to find a cure for his ailment. The sorcerer stared at him for several minutes and then said: “You have a tumor in your ear. Take a train to Zürich, go to the Universitätspital and look for Professor Ugo Fish. He will cure you.” So the man took a train to Zürich, walked to the University Hospital and succeeded in making an appointment with Professor Ugo Fish. Ugo examined the patient, sent him for audiological tests and th...

One day Dr. Walter Page Covell, Professor of Anatomy and Otolaryngology (and a very good friend) told me that there was a large collection of sections of guinea pig cochleas that had been used in an investigation carried out for the American Air Forces during the Second Word War. All of the guinea pigs had been exposed to noise and the hair cells in the organ of Corti had been carefully evaluated, establishing a relation between the intensity of the noise exposure and the cell damage. Different frequencies had been used, as well as different intensities. This extensive study was carried out by Dr. Covell and Dr. Donald H. Eldredge, a neurophysiologist at the Central Institute for the Deaf (CID). “In many of these sections,” said Dr. Covell, “we can see parts of the vestibular labyrinth. I want you to check whether the intense sound can also damage the vestibular end-organs.” For the next few months I was busy checking the sections of each guinea pig in the study to find the ones in whi...

History of Medicine ... 7 Alchemy was an important discipline in the Middle Ages and it extended itself into  Renaissance. Most alchemists were highly educated persons and possessed knowledge in many areas. Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim was an alchemist who was also a physician, philosopher, botanist, astrologer and a specialist in occult sciences.He called himself “Paracelsus,” for he considered himself “equal or superior to Celsus,” referring to Roman encyclopedist Cornelius Celsus, who wrote six treatises about medicine in the 1st century. Incidentally, these were the first medical books to be printed in movable type after Gutenberg invented them. Paracelsus was born near Zürich in 1493 and died in the Old Swiss Confederacy in 1541. He started to study Medicine in Basel, moved to Vienna and finished his studies in  Ferrara. He journeyed extensively through Germany, France, Spain, Hungary, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and Russia, all the time qu...

A long time ago my associate Mauricio Ganança and I experimented with a new drug, called cinnarizine, and published several papers about its use in patients with labyrinthine disorders. When I went to Zürich for a medical meeting organized by Prof. Ugo Fish, I was invited to visit Janssen Pharmaceutica, in Belgium, the laboratory that had developed cinnarizine. So, after the meeting, my wife and I flew from Zürich to Brussels to visit the laboratory. For some reason we thought that it was near Brussels, but we were mistaken. As soon as we crossed the passport control in Brussels’ airport we saw a man with a small billboard saying “Janssen” and we went in his direction. He checked our names and took us to a Mercedes limousine. Then he took off, left Brussells and rode for about forty minutes on a fine road. He did not speak English nor French, only Flemish, so we could not talk. And we had no idea about where he was taking us. Then he stopped at a hotel and helped us to get registered....