Pedro L. Mangabeira Albernaz

The Albert Einstein Israelite Hospital in São Paulo is now commemorating its 60th anniversary. The 60 years are being counted from the first meeting of the group of people who decided to build the Hospital, held at the house of the first President, Professor Manoel Tabacow Hidal. This group wanted to express the gratitude of the Jewish population of São Paulo for having been so well received and treated in the country where they chose to live. The Albert Einstein Hospital in 2015 The Hospital was officially inaugurated in 1971. In this year there was a Brazilian Congress of Otolaryngology in São Paulo and we had a Pre-Congress Course on ear surgery that was held at the Kleinberger Auditory of the Hospital. Professor Hidal, whom I knew from my medical school days, saw me during the lunch interval and invited me to visit the Hospital with him. We set a date about a week later and I joined him briefly at his office. Then we took an elevator to the 13th floor and visited each flo...

It is interesting to note that the two persons connected to Otolaryngology who received a Nobel Prize in Medicine were mainly interested in the ear and were both born in Hungary. I already mentioned Robert Bárány, who won the prize in 1914 and now we will talk about Georg von Békésy, who won the prize in 1961. Georg von Békésy * Békésy was born in 1899 in Budapest.  He studied chemistry in Bern and received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Budapest in 1926. Before and during the Second World War he worked for the Royal Hungarian Institute for Research in Telegraphy, in Budapest, where he studied the signal quality in telecommunications and then became interested in the physiology of hearing. My professor of neurophysiology, Dr. Hallowell Davis, once told me that another great scientist, Professor Ernest Glenn Wever, the man who discovered the cochlear microphonics, visited Békésy in Budapest and, on his return, succeeded in convincing the professors of Harvard U...