Pedro L. Mangabeira Albernaz

In 1966 I wrote a thesis to become an Associate Professor in Otolaryngology at my Medical School and wrote a paper reporting the most important findings. This was published  in The Laryngoscope*. Soon after the publication, I received a letter from Dr. Wallace Rubin, congratulating me for the paper. I had heard of him and had read many of his papers, but we had never met. I was happy to receive a compliment, at the beginning of my career, from a well known physician with whom I had had no personal contact. In 1971 he was invited to a Congress in Brazil. We were together several times during the meeting, some of them with our wives. We became good friends. My wife and I used to stay in his home when we traveled to New Orleans and Elsie and Wally stayed in our home when they came to São Paulo. In 1976 he asked New Orleans Mayor to make me an Honorary Citizen of the city; this certificate is proudly hanging from one of the walls of my office. When we went to New York they would fl...

Renaissance was a cultural movement that began in 14th century in Florence, in the Late Middle Ages, and lasted three centuries, spreading to all Europe. It probably arised from the rediscovery of Greek, Roman and Arabic classical texts on natural sciences, philosophy and mathematics, leading to a sudden flowering of literature, science, art, religion, education and politics. Renaissance brought progress in many areas, even if it is better known by its artists. The Renaissance scholars employed the humanist method of study, and searched for realism and human emotion in art. Science and art were intermingled in the early Renaissance, with artists such as Leonardo da Vinci studying anatomy to improve the quality of his paintings and sculptures. Dissections of human cadavers were strictly prohibited by the Roman Catholic Church, but Da Vinci performed them. The illustration depicted here shows one of his anatomical drawings. It is quite possible that Michelangelo did the same. The “secr...

We know now that our inner ears contain a fluid called endolymph , a fluid totally different from all of our “extracellular” fluids, like blood, lymph and cerebral spinal fluid. All of these fluids have a large concentration of sodium and a small concentration of potassium. But endolymph is rich in potassium and has little sodium. Just like the fluids that we have inside our cells. Large amounts of energy are needed to fuel our sodium-potassium “pumps,” the enzymes that remove the sodium from these special, potassium rich, fluids. Of course, all scientists know this. But not all of them know who discovered the composition of endolymph. It was a scientist called Catherine Smith. She worked for many years at the Department of Otolaryngology of Washington University in Saint Louis. This important work was published in 1954*. Vascularization of the stria vascularis She started her brilliant career as a laboratory technician. Drs. Theo Walsh, Walter  Covell and Edward Dempsey, P...