Pedro L. Mangabeira Albernaz

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...