Pedro L. Mangabeira Albernaz

Part II During the 48th Brazilian Congress of Otorhinolaryngology there was a presentation named The Future of Otolaryngology. I decided to include in my list of blogs this slightly expanded version of my presentation. Some of the names mentioned here have been presented in other pages of this blog. Ádám Politzer Politzer is celebrated as a pioneer of modern otology in the History of Medicine. For many years he was the Professor of Otolaryngology of the University of Vienna and attracted many physicians from different countries, influencing and training thousands of otologists from all over the world. He invented many medical instruments for the diagnosis and treatment of ear diseases. He created the ventilation tubes for the aeration of the middle ear after paracentesis and created the otoscope. He made the first observation that the middle ear ossicles vibrate to sound stimuli.  Wladimir Michailowitsch Bechterew An important Russian neurophysiologist, creato...

During the 48th Brazilian Congress of Otorhinolaryngology there was a presentation named The Future of Otolaryngology. I decided to include in my list of blogs this slightly expanded version of my presentation. Some of the names mentioned here have been presented in other pages of this blog. PART I Time is a relative dimension. The past, the present and the future are all interlinked. The things we do today are a consequence of the past, and the things we will do in the future are a consequence of what we do today. All journeys start with a first step. I include here some of the people I believe were responsible for first steps at different times.    Galen was a Greek physician who spent most of his life in Rome. He was born in 129 and died in 200. His concepts dominated medical science for nearly two thousand years.    He performed many anatomical studies, based on dissections of monkeys and pigs, since the Roman law prohibit...

In the nervous system, a synapse is a structure that permits a nerve cell to pass an electrical or chemical signal to another nerve cell. The word comes from the Greek synapsis , which means “conjunction”, and was first employed by the English neurophysiologist Charles Sherrington in 1897. When I arrived in Saint Louis in 1958 and began to spend some afternoons at the Central Institute for the Deaf, Dr. Donald H. Eldredge – a neurophysiologist and also a good friend – told me a story concerning the synapses of the cochlear hair cells. With the advent of the electron microscope in the early 1950s, nerve endings were found to contain a large number of small vesicles. The term synaptic vesicles was given to these structures. He also told me that one of the researchers involved in electron microscopy had a special interest for quantum theory and made some calculations on the size of the vesicles. As predicted by Max Planck, the quantum mechanics are absolutely essential to deal with...