Pedro L. Mangabeira Albernaz

Bartolomeo Eustachi was one of most important anatomists of the sixteenth century. He is more commonly referred to by his Latin name, Eustachius. He was born in San Severino, in Italy, around 1510. He was a contemporary of Vesalius, with whom he shares the reputation of having created the science of human anatomy. His father, Mariano, was a physician, and he gave his son a classical education. He studied Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic. He studied Medicine in Rome and began his practice around 1540. He became a professor of anatomy at the Archiginnasio della Sapienza, in Rome and, because of his position, he was able to obtain human cadavers for dissection. Religious reverence for the body made the Roman Catholic Church prohibit the dissection of  human corpses for many centuries. Following the Black Death Plague, however, the Popes wanted to know the cause of the disease and permitted postmortem examinations of plague victims. But it was almost 200 years later that Pope Clement VII, in ...

Our ears are sensitive to loud noise. We may acquire a hearing loss from acoustic trauma, such as explosions, gun shots, and similar sudden loud noises, or we can get hearing loss from repeated sound stimulation, as working in a factory with machines that produce loud noises. In the past hearing losses were related to some old professions, like blacksmiths and makers of metal pans and pots. During the II World War acoustic trauma and noise induced hearing loss became a serious problem. Soldiers were affected by loud sounds from artillery (guns, cannons, granades), explosions of shells and bombs. Pilots were constantly exposed to the noise of their airplanes. The Department of Otolaryngology at Washington University in Saint Louis was commissioned by the United States Army Air Force to make an experimental study on acoustic trauma, hoping that understanding the involved mechanisms would help to establish adequate mechanisms of prevention. These studies led to interesting neurophys...

Today it is not about Medicine. It is about Literature. “The Lusiads” is an epic poem written by Luís Vaz de Camões, the most famous of  Portuguese poets. He is considered the best epic poet of all Portuguese literature and also the best lyric poet of his time. I remember reading a book by William Somerset Maugham in which he tells us of a man that he met somewhere in the South Seas who was writing a new translation of “The Lusiads.” “It is the best epic poem ever written,” said the man to Maugham. “It tells much more than all others. The Iliad is all about the Trojan War. The Odyssey is merely Ulysses’ return travel to Greece. The Aeneid is just Aeneas trip from the destroyed city of Troy to Italy. “But ‘The Lusiads’, although focused on Vasco da Gama’s discovery of the route to India, tell us all of the history of Portugal. Unfortunately it is written in a language that few people read and the existing translations are not good.” The poem was first published in 1572 an...