Jack Van Doren Hough, M.D.

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 enlarging techniques to increase the length of the stapedial tendon, so that the patient would not be deprived of the tympanic reflexes. Since the stapedius tendon is so small, you can imagine how difficult it was to perform this surgical maneuver.

In his thesis for membership in the Triological Society, in 1958, he included photos taken under the surgical microscope and described approximately 500 rare anatomical variations and congenital anomalies of the middle ear that he found during surgeries. He was the first otologist to describe the congenital absence of the stapedial tendon in some patients.

We also met in different medical meetings, in different places, including one Brazilian Congress in Rio de Janeiro. I distinctly remember a meeting in Valencia, when Jack, his wife Jodie, my wife and I were invited to dinner at the house of the Congress President, Don Luís Garcia-Ibañez. As costumary in Spain, the dinner was set for 11:00 PM. I think we left his home to return to our hotel at about 1:00 AM. The four of us were very sleepy, trying very hard to keep awake and talk to our hosts, Don Luís and his wife.

We also met in Los Angeles in 1977 for Bill House’s first Symposium on Cochlear Implants. In fact, he was Bill’s first co-investigator on cochlear implants. Today we are quite accustomed with the fact that cochlear implants use magnets to align the external and the internal units. Not only the idea of using magnets was Jack’s contribution, but he also experimented with several types of rare earth magnets, searching for the very best ones. 

His Department at the University of Oklahoma invented the first bone conduction hearing device, the Xomed Audiant Bone Conductor. His group also an electromagnetic middle ear hearing aid that was recently improved and is called the Ototronix Maxum.

Jack was a member of many societies, was president of the American Otological Society, of the American Neurotology Society, the Triological Society, the Politzer Society, and many others. He was one of the founders of the Deafness Research Foundation, now renamed Hearing Health Foundation. 

His achievements and reputation did not change him. To the people who worked with him and learned with him he was both a fine teacher and a good friend. We will all miss him very much.