Pedro L. Mangabeira Albernaz

Although Malpighi began to use the microscope for anatomical studies in the 1600's, almost three centuries elapsed until it began to be used in the operating room. Microsurgical techniques are now employed in several areas of Medicine. But we, ear, nose and throat specialists, are proud to have been the ones who started using these techniques. A Swedish otolaryngologist, Carl-Olof Siggesson Nylén (1892-1978), was the father of microsurgery. In 1921, in the University of Stockholm, he built the first surgical microscope, a modified monocular Brinell-Leitz microscope. At first he used it for operations in animals. In November of the same ear he used it to operate on a patient with chronic otitis media who had a labyrinthine fistula. Nylén was particularly interested in Neurotology and is well known for describing a disease that he named vestibular neuritis, a sudden loss of function of one of the labyrinths. Nylen's microscope was soon replaced by a binocular microscope, develope...

Marcello Malpighi was the first anatomist to incorporate the microscope in his studies. Marcello Malpighi - Wikimedia Commons The microscope was invented by Hans Jansen, a Dutch spectacle-maker, in 1590 and was modified by Galileo in 1609. Its possibilities for biological studies, however, came approximately 50 years later, when Robert Hooke improved it. Then Malpighi, Hooke, Nehemiah Grew and Antoine van Leeuwenhoek  began their investigations using the new tool. Hooke studied mainly insects, and was the creator of the word cell for describing biological organisms. Grew was a vegetable anatomist. Leeuwenhoek manufactured many microscopes (of high quality for that time) and actually made important discoveries, such as bacteria   (large Selenomonads from the human mouth), the vacuoles of the cells, the banded pattern of muscular fibers and the spermatozoa (for this discovery he had serious disagreements with the Dutch theologists). Hooke's microscope, employed by Malpi...