Pedro L. Mangabeira Albernaz

History of Medicine ... 8 In old times surgeons were not physicians, they were classified with the barbers. They were people with manual abilities, but usually uncultured and without adequate knowledge of the glorious medical profession. They were despised by the physicians. Ambroise Paré was the man who changed this, he was probably the first eminent surgeon. He was also a pioneer on forensic medicine. He was born around 1510 in Laval, France, and died in Paris in 1590. He first learned to be a barber and later learned wound-dressing at the Hôtel-Dieu, in Paris. Snubbed by the physicians at the Collège de St. Côme, he decided to join the army, where he achieved his fame. A Spanish surgeon, Juan de Vigo, published in 1514 a book called Practica Copiosa in Arte Chirurgica , in which he stated, quite dogmatically, that gunshot wounds were poisoned and had to be treated with boiling oil. This became the treatment of choice for these wounds. Paré followed this tradition for a certain perio...

A few days ago I received a copy of the second edition of Joe Kraft’s book, Diabetes Epidemic & You . It was autographed this way:   Dear Pedro: You are now a part of this book – forever. Thank you so much. Joe.   I was very touched. And he also included my comments about the 2009 edition in his Preface-2011. I met him in Bad Kissingen, many years ago, in a meeting of the Neurotological and Equilibriometric Society, presided by our common friend Claus Claussen. But I had been following his line of work before that. It was in 1972 that Joe Kraft began to titrate insulin in the oral glucose tolerance tests and published the results of the first 500 patients. When he retired in 1998, he had tested 14,384 patients! He established the concept of diabetes in situ, or occult diabetes, and established hyperinsulinemia as the most important sign of early diabetes. Otologists have known for a long time the relation between changes in carbohydrate metabolism and hearin...

Carlo Mondini was an anatomist of the University of Bologna. He was born at the city of Bologna in 1729 and died in 1803. In 1791 he made a detailed report on the dissection of the temporal bones of an 8-year-old boy whom he knew to be deaf and who had died of gangrene resulting from an infection of a foot. In fact, he had been run over by a carriage and in those days open fractures became easily infected and most severe infections were fatal. Mondini was not specialized in inner ear anatomy, so he performed his dissections very slowly, so that he would not make any mistakes. He also felt that in case he did make a mistake in the first bone, he would avoid it in the second. But he did not make any mistakes, and he himself drew pictures to show his findings. He stated that the congenital defect in this boy’s ears was the same: the superior coil of the cochlea was missing, the entire labyrinth was enlarged and the vestibular aqueducts were very large. For many ears the Mondini dyspl...