Pedro L. Mangabeira Albernaz

Robert Bárány is the father of Neurotology, an area of Medicine that explores the boundaries of Otology and Neurology. He was born in Vienna on April 22, 1876. Vienna, at that time, was a part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire.  His father, Ignaz Bárány, was a bank official. His mother, Maria Hock Bárány, was the daughter of a well-known Prague scientist, and it was her intellectual influence that was most pronounced in the family. Robert was the eldest of six children.  He studied Medicine at the Vienna University, graduating in 1900. After his graduation he spent one year in Frankfurt studying general medicine and then studied neurology and psychiatry in Freiburg. It was at this time that he became interested in neurological problems. Robert Bárány In 1903 he was appointed as “demonstrator” at the Otological Clinic of Vienna University, working with  Professor Adam Politzer. This was a very productive period, in which he created the caloric tests for studying t...

This time I will tell you about a grand-uncle that I never met. He had a very short life, he died when he was 25 years old. He was born in 1879 and died in 1904. He was a poet. He was also a physician and a soldier. Francisco Mangabeira Drawing by Maria Sílva Mangabeira Albernaz In 1968 my father wrote a book about him, called “Sonho e Aventura” (“Dream and Aventure”). I remember the time when he undertook the project of writing this book. He talked many times with his uncles João and Octavio, Francisco’s younger brothers, collected in Salvador many unpublished poems and writings and went to São Luís, in the state of Maranhão, to visit his tomb.  My father never knew his uncle; he only heard from his parents that Chico (as the family called him) had carried him when he was two years old. But Chico stayed many years in different areas and my father was 8 years old when the family received the news that Chico had died.  Now my nephew Eduardo Mangabeira Albernaz republis...

For a long period of time Vienna was the Otolaryngology capital of the world. My father’s teacher, Professor Eduardo de Moraes, who taught other famous Brazilian otolaryngologists – Ermiro de Lima, Octacilio Lopes and Arthur Sá, among others – was trained in Vienna. The older otolaryngologists in São Paulo, Henrique Lindenberg, Francisco Hartung, Antonio de Paula Santos e Raphael da Nova, also studied in Vienna. I do not know how many American otolaryngologists studied in Vienna, but I know that Max Goldstein, who created The Laryngoscope and founded the Central Institute for the Deaf went to Vienna in search of more knowledge.  The man responsible for establishing in Vienna this famous school of Otolaryngology was Ádám Politzer. Ádám Politzer Politzer was born in 1835 in Alberti, near Budapest. He belonged to a well established Jewish family that provided him with an excellent education. He studied medicine in the University of Vienna, graduating in 1859. Working with th...

Many years ago I went to Omaha, the largest city in the state of Nebraska, located just west of the Missouri River. I went to visit the Boys Town National Institute of Communicative Disorders in Children, an institution devoted to diagnose and establish educational conducts for children with problems in language acquisition, including profound hearing loss. This Institute is particularly interesting, because in the same building there is a very modern hospital, the o Boys Town National Research Hospital, so that the children who need surgical treatment, including cochlear implants, can get immediate attention. I was invited to visit the Institute by the late Dr. John Bordley, who was then a Professor Emeritus of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, in Baltimore. The President of the Institute was Dr. Patrick E. Brookhouser, one of Dr. Bordley’s former residents. Patrick remained very active until his death in 2011. On a beautiful afternoon Dr. Bordley and Patrick took me to Boys Tow...

I have written about the American big bands, about Bobby Short and about Dorival Caymmi, the great Brazilian composer of songs of the sea. I also talked about George Gershwin and his opera “Porgy and Bess”. Maybe now it is time to talk about some classical music. In fact, I grew up listening to classical music. My father loved operas and loved Beethoven. And he loved Enrico Caruso. And occasionally we would listen to Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, etc. I did not inherit his appreciation for opera. It should be an adequate combination of music and theater, but most usually the theater part is poor. Most of the time good opera singers are poor theater actors. This is gradually changing, maybe influenced by the Broadway and London shows, who have demonstrated that there are good actors who can sing and dance. I saw an extraordinary performance of Carmen in Athens, at the Herodes Atticus open air theater (originally build on year 161), in which all of the performers, including José Ca...

Prosper Ménière is an important name in the fields of Otology and Neurotology. In 1861 he  presented a paper before the French Academy of Medicine in which he described a series of patients with episodic vertigo and hearing loss. He also mentioned the postmortem examination of a young girl who experienced vertigo after a hemorrhage into the inner ear. Before that time, vertigo was thought to be a cerebral symptom similar to epilepsy. Menière pointed out that vertigo frequently had a benign course. He was not attempting to define a disease or syndrome but rather to emphasize that vertigo originated from damage to the inner ear. A portrait of Prosper Menière The disease that he described in 1861 is still named after him. And he is praised by his precise clinical description of its symptoms. The French neurologists of that time, however, firmly believed that vertigo was a brain disorder. In fact, their belief was so intense that they attacked Menière in a vicious manner. The Fre...

Here I am, again, in Mar Grande, in the island of Itaparica. Last year’s vacation was so pleasant that my wife, my youngest daughter, her husband, her two children and I decided to reprise it. And I am now sitting on the beach, listening to the sounds of the sea and remembering Dorival Caymmi’s songs. Actually Caymmi’s songs are the sounds of the sea...  A picture of Dorival Caymmi I remember reading a statement by Dorothy Hammerstein, Oscar Hammerstein II’s wife, saying, “ Ol’ Man River was written by my husband. Jerry (Jerome Kern) only added the sounds of the river...” She was partially right; the lyrics that Oscar wrote for Ol’ Man River are superb. But it was Kern’s “sounds of the Mississipi river” that immortalized the song.  Dorival Caymmi was a great genius of Brazilian music who wrote the songs of the sea and Jerome Kern, like Caymmi, was a musical genius who wrote the sounds of the Mississipi river.  Their music is totally different, but they share ...