Pedro L. Mangabeira Albernaz

On December 22 my wife and I, accompanied by my youngest daughter, her husband and her two children − the boy  2 years and a half and the girl 9 months old – flew from São Paulo to Salvador and then took a boat to Mar Grande, a small city in the island of Itaparica. We went to the house of very good friends. Many years passed since we were here for the last time, but we used to come here very often. In fact my youngest daughter and my friends' children grew together. Now that we are again together it is obvious that nothing changed. The girls that I knew when they were children, now married and with children of their own, treat me like a second father, with an indescribable amount of friendliness and warmth. My daughter is just like a sister to them. I am now at the veranda looking at the sea, that is just a few meters away. Across the sea a beautiful view of the city of Salvador, where my parents grew. The view is magnificent, the sea is calm, the sounds that I ...

My friend Bill House passed away on Friday, December 7, 2012, at his home. He was 89 years old. I have already written a page in this blog, where I stated that he was my guru, my otological model, my friend. Bill's autobiography -- one must read it It is not difficult to write about a great physician, about a man who revolutionized ear surgery and is recognized all through the world as the “father of surgical neurotology.” It is much more difficult to write about the loss of a very dear friend. We have been together many times, in many different places. I visited him in Los Angeles on several occasions, watching his operations, learning new techniques and new tricks.  My wife and I would often stay at his house in Whitier, as well as in the one in Newport Beach, after he left Los Angeles. He came to Brazil several times, to São Paulo, to Rio, to Salvador, to Belo Horizonte, to Brasília, almost always with his wife June. In São Paulo they would stay in our house. I remem...

My friend Jack Hough died on November 1, 2012, at the age of 92. I met him during my stay in Saint Louis. He had been a resident of Dr. Theodore Walsh and once in a while he came from Oklahoma to visit his Alma Mater. I remember being at his side during a series of operations performed by Dr. Walsh, both of us with a Lempert-Storz headlight on our heads, something that was mandatory in our Department, so that whenever the Chief found something interesting we were supposed to come near and take a look, and therefore we needed the headlight.  Soon after that came the stapedectomy era and Dr. Walsh’s fenestrations were no longer frequently performed. And Jack was one of the pioneers of stapes surgery, devising his own very special techniques and instruments (his footplate excavator is even now one of my favorite instruments). He would often perform a partial stapedectomy, using the posterior crus of the stapes in place of a prosthesis, and he tried the orthopedists’ tendon enl...

Many years ago my wife and I attended a Collegium* Meeting in Corfu, a Greek island in the Ionic Sea, very close to Albania. The Meeting was quite remarkable, as it usually happens in the Collegium. And, of course, there were many friends present, and it is always nice to see friends from other countries. Apart from that, however, we were in a paradise. A lovely island, with friendly people and a very special atmosphere. Fortunately we had time to wonder through the old and new towns, learn the exciting history of the island. Besides history, there are the legends. Corfu seems to have been the mythical island of the Phaeacians, and it is said that the bay of Palaiokastritsa was the beach where Odysseus was saved from a shipwreck and met Nausicaa for the first time. Nausicaa was the girl who took care of him and later married one of his sons. It is also believed that Corfu is the magical island where Prospero lived, according to Shakespeare’s last play, The Tempest. Shakespeare, ho...

Antonio Maria Valsalva was an important Italian physician that was born in Imola in 1666. He was a contemporary of Newton, Bach and Molière and, following the traditions of his time, was educated in humanities, mathematics, and natural sciences. After his studies of the liberal arts, he studied Medicine and Philosophy at the University of Bologna, where he was a disciple of Marcello Malpighi, the founder of microscopic anatomy. Malpighi deeply respected Valsalva, who was his favorite student. And Valsalva was a great admirer of Malpighi. Portrait of Valsalva (Wikimedia Commons) Valsalva graduated from the medical school in 1687 and in 1705 was appointed Pprofessor of Anatomy at Bologna. He was later chosen as President of the Academy of the Sciences. His most important disciple was Giovanni Battista Morgagni, who edited Valsalva’s complete writings and published a biography of Valsalva in 1740. He was considered a very skilled anatomist and pathologist, a fine physician and ...

I was in my second year of medical school when they played Porgy and Bess here in São Paulo, at a theater that no longer exists. Of course I loved Rhapsody in Blue . Of course I loved George Gershwin’s popular songs, like Embraceable You, Someone to Watch Over Me , The Man I Love, and so on, and so on. Of course I had to go and see it. I did not have much money, so I bought a ticket on the highest part of the theater. I remember that on the main floor there were many very well dressed colored people. I was happy to see that in my town there was a high class of colored people, I did not know that they existed. I remember that the company had four Porgys and three Besses, because they had to sing for long periods of time and it was difficult for any single singer to do it every night. On my night Bess was Leontyne Price. She was very young then, of course you know how famous she became since then. Wikimedia Commons I was dazzled. I was flabbergasted. I still am when I hear S...

I had a very interesting meeting in Singapore a few weeks ago. It was a long trip. I flew from São Paulo to Doha, in Qatar, a 14 hours direct flight. I waited there for three hours and then took another plane to Singapore, a 7 ½ hours flight. Of course I had a severe jet lag; local time in Singapore is 11 hours ahead of that of São Paulo. Consequently I was very sleepy in the afternoons, but I had a couple of days to get adjusted, so I was not sleepy on the day of the meeting.    This was a Steering Committee meeting, a group of people whose task was to supervise a medical research. There were two people from Holland, one from Switzerland, two from England, one from Russia, two from Singapore. A professor from India could not come but we could hear him and talk to him through a telephone conference. We convened from 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM, with a brief interval for lunch.  We did not know each other; we met at a dinner on the eve of the meeting. As each of us returned ...

Many years ago I read a mystery book by Edgar Wallace and I remember that he described his detective, a Scotland Yard inspector, as being “very old.” He added that he was “more than fifty.” I think that the concept of old age is gradually changing. Nowadays people stay young much longer. Still I often see relatively young patients who feel old and old patients who, surprisingly, feel and act as though they were very young. After fifty, I think the age that counts is the age that people feel and project, not the age that is counted in years. I am also remembering a book that I read a long time ago, called “The Way of All Flesh,” a wonderful autobiographical novel written by Samuel Butler. One of most beautiful statements that he makes in his book is that “spring, like youth, is an overpraised season.” He felt very happy in the autumn of his life. Also one of the most beautiful of Frank Sinatra’s records is called “The Autumn of My Years.” An interesting and important char...

Some Notes About My Father My father was born in Bagé, in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, grew up in Salvador, in the state of Bahia, and lived most of his life in Campinas, in the state of São Paulo. His parents were from Bahia. The reason he was born in Bagé is that his father was an army physician and was sent to many different places; my grandfather and my grandmother moved back to Salvador when my father was two years old. I never met my paternal grandfather. He died of a congenital heart disease when he was 39 years old. My father told me that one day he brought home a pulse plethysmograph, a spring operated device that recorded pulse. My father was in the third year of medical school but had never seen this instrument and was curious about it. So my grandfather took a piece of paper, blackened it with the smoke of a candle and attached it to the plethysmograph. Then he placed his finger on the instrument and set it in motion. The recording needle added a white tracing to t...

I remember reading an article in a magazine called High Fidelity , that no longer exists, that showed sonograms of recordings by musicians and singers. The author compared Louis Armstrong singing and Louis Armstrong playing his trumpet. There was a remarkable similarity in the tracings. That is not surprising. What I did find surprising is that the sonograms of Tommy Dorsey playing the trombone and Frank Sinatra singing were also quite similar. Sinatra often mentioned that he learned to breathe listening to Tommy Dorsey’s trombone. But it is not only that. He also learned phrasing with Tommy Dorsey. These curious findings remind me of the time of the big bands. I was about 10 years old when I began to listen to the 78 rpm records that my older brothers bought.  This was the time of the big bands, and I loved them. We listened to Tommy Dorsey, Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, Harry James, Glenn Miller, Jimmy Dorsey... And also Duke Ellington, Woody Herman, Jimmie Lunceford... Not o...

One of these days I saw a young woman who had dizzy spells and was feeling quite uncomfortable with her symptoms. In fact, the sensation of vertigo is something terrible, particularly when the first episode is intense; many patients feel that they are going to die.  But this young woman had been seen by several doctors and had been submitted to several tests. When I asked her to describe her problem she told me all about the visits to the other doctors and the medicines that had been prescribed. “Let us start at the beginning,” I said to her, “and try to tell me what you feel when you have a spell, and how long does it last, and what you do about it. This is like a Sherlock Holmes story, you know? He always tells his clients that he must know all of the details, even those that apparently bear no relation.” There is a serious risk that detailed clinical histories will soon become extinct. Modern medicine is too much involved with an extraordinary amount of technological pr...

Prof. Pedro de Alcantara Marcondes Machado was a famous pediatrician in São Paulo. He was one of the founders of my Medical School, the Escola Paulista de Medicina (EPM). My father was also one of the founders of EPM and they were very good friends. I met Prof. Alcantara when I was in my second year of medical school, on a day that he was invited to have lunch with my parents, in our home. A few years later he became my professor. I believe that our class was the last one that he lectured at EPM.  He was Professor of Pediatrics at the São Paulo Faculty of Hygiene, at EPM and at the University of São Paulo Faculty of Medicine. He published many books, wrote many papers, contributed enormously to change many concepts in pediatrics and puericulture. As it happens with all pioneers, he often had to fight vigorously for his ideas, that are now part of the everyday practice of pediatricians. But besides being a great scientist, he was a great human being, and very friendly. Duri...

Gabriele Falloppio was one of the great anatomists of the sixteenth century, a follower of Vesalius. He as born in Modena in 1523 and died in Padua in 1562. He belonged to a noble family that was, however, very poor. The family’s financial difficulties made him join the clergy. In 1542 he became the canon at Modena's cathedral. He then decided to study medicine, graduating at the University of Ferrara in 1548. Portrait of Fallopio - Wikimedia Commons On receiving his degree he became professor of Anatomy in Ferrara, then at the University of Pisa in 1549 and in 1551 moved to the University of Padua where he worked until his death. He was also a professor of botany and was superintendent of the botanical gardens. His accomplishments in anatomy were quite important, even though he died before reaching the age of 40; the cause of his death is unknown. He was noted for his modesty and deference to his fellow workers and especially to Vesalius. Whenever his studies led to diff...

In 1965 I went to Tokyo for my first World Congress of Otolaryngology. It was a big adventure.  I flew from Campinas to Lima, then to Los Angeles, on a Varig Boeing 707; spent a night on a hotel near the LA airport, then flew from LA to Tokyo in a Japan Air Lines DC-8, with stops on Honolulu and Wake Island. I remember leaving LA at 10:00 AM and arriving in Tokyo at 5:00 PM of the following day. It took me three days to be able to sleep. A 12-hour jet leg is difficult to overcome, even though I was young. The Meeting, however, was excellent, and very well organized. There was a small group of Brazilians attending the Meeting. One of them was a Nissei – a first generation Brazilian born Japanese. His name was Miiko Imamura. On the first day of the Meeting he took me and some other Brazilians for a quick lunch in a small restaurant close to the Convention Center. He talked to the waiter in fluent Japanese and the waiter took us to a nice table and brought menus for all of us...

In 2004 Prof. Ricardo Bento and I organized the first (and only) meeting of the Collegium Oto-rhino-laryngologicum Amicitiae Sacrum held in the southern hemisphere. I had the opportunity to welcome the members of the Collegium to Costa do Sauipe, near Salvador, where the Meeting was held. I was looking at old papers in my office and found this speech, that was not published. I would like to share it with you. My wife and I at the opening of the Collegium Meeting in Bahia A little more than 500 years ago a group of Portuguese sailors, commanded by Pedro Alvares Cabral, landed not very far from here, officially discovering Brazil. Two years previously they had found the sea route to India. I feel that they were as brave and intrepid as the men who now venture in outer space. They did not know how to measure longitude. In order to know where they were they had to rely on logs of previous voyages and on the beautiful stars of the southern hemisphere skies, such as the Souther...