Pedro L. Mangabeira Albernaz

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 ...

The Greek-Roman physician Galen, in the second century, gave the name of labyrinth to the inner ear, in view of the difficulties he had in trying to understand its complicated anatomy. It reminded him of the Greek mythology story of the Cretan king Minos, who ordered the architect Dedalus to build a very complex structure where people got lost and could not find their way out. Even Dedalus, imprisoned in the labyrinth when he finished building it, could not escape. The great anatomists gradually deciphered the enigmas of the labyrinth. The first complete description, however, had to wait for the Swedish histologist Gustav Retzius (1842-1919), who did a fantastic job of describing and drawing the inner ear, being successful in dealing with the great difficulties of tissue fixation in that time. But even Retzius believed that the semicircular canals, the saccule and the utricle were parts of the auditory system. Jean-Pierre-Marie Flourens was one of the first neurophysiologists, t...

I still remember my first Thanksgiving dinner. It was in 1958, the year in which I arrived in Saint Louis for my otological training. I was invited by Dr. Walter Covell, my teacher of otolaryngological anatomy, who would later become my adviser when I applied for my Master’s degree. I had no idea of what was the Thanksgiving day. Nowadays many people in Brazil commemorate it, but at that time it was totally unknown to me. And of course I tried to find out what it was all about. I know that there are many doubts concerning the historical veracity of the legend, but the attempts to modify it are equally difficult to prove and are definitely less satisfying to our souls than the original one. It all began with a harvest. Harvest festivals are not uncommon, but they happen immediately after the harvest. This one is different. We celebrate one specific occasion that happened a long time ago.  It seems that the Pilgrims had had some bad harvests. And since they were attemptin...

In 2008 I received a letter from Prof. Nina Azari, inviting me to collaborate on a project that she had just devised. I do not know her and I have no idea why she chose me as one of the many persons that she invited to join her project. At that time Dr. Azari was working at the Department of Psychology of the University of Hawaii at Hilo. She is now a part of the science faculty of Ridgeview Classical Schools in Fort Collins, Colorado. She is a specialist in cognitive neuroscience and psychology of religion. She uses psychological methods and medical imaging technology to study things like religious experiences, consciousness, belief and perception in her volunteer subjects. In one of her best known studies she used positron emission tomography (PET-Scan) to measure brain activity in six fundamentalist Christians and six non-religious controls.  Each subject had go through six different situations: 1 - stay resting for a few minutes; 2- read the first verse of the 23rd p...

I have just finished reading a book called "Zealot," by Reza Aslan. Mortuary mask of Jesus, drawn by my uncle Francisco Mangabeira Albernaz Dr. Aslan is associate professor of Creative Writing at the University of California Riverside. He was born in Iran and is a Muslim. And his book is about Jesus. It is the result of twenty years of research on the New Testament and the beginnings of Christianity conducted at the University of Santa Clara, Harvard University and University of California Santa Barbara. In my book Em busca de Deus (In search of God) I wrote a chapter about Jesus. It caused me a good deal of satisfaction to see that Aslan's opinions are the same as mine. But there is no question that his research was much more thorough than mine. And his book is definitely worth reading. I do not regard Jesus as God, I regard him as a man. An extraordinary man for whom I have an enormous admiration. As a God, his intrinsic qualities can be taken for granted. ...

This year I was invited to give a talk on the first day of the Jewish New Year. New years, whether Jewish, or Christian, or Zoroastrian, to mention the few that I observe, are always linked to resolutions. We always try to idealize things that we should but often fail to accomplish in the new year.  One of the characteristics of the Jewish New Year is the blowing of the shofar. This is a primitive musical instrument, made of a sheep’s ram. When God gave us the Bible at Mount Sinai the blast of the shofar was heard.  My speech also mentions Hasidism, a 18th century Jewish movement whose leader was Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, who became known as the Baal Shem Tov – the Lord of the Good Name. He was a charismatic leader that used to say that we should always be close to God, not only in moments of affliction, but also when we are cheerful and happy. Rabbi Rami Shapiro is, to me, a neo-hasid. He is an important contemporary intellectual who wrote many books. I quote her...

Marcus Vinitius da Cruz e Mello Moraes was a poet, a diplomat, a composer of songs and a writer of lyrics. His presence in Brazil’s musical scenery was outstanding, as was that of his partners Antonio Carlos Jobim, Baden Powell, Edu Lobo, Carlos Lyra, Toquinho and several others. Vinicius de Moraes - (Ricardo Alfieri, via Wikimedia Commons) This is not a biography of Vinicius, which can be easily found. It is rather a collection of things that happened in his life and that I can assure you are all true – either I saw them happen or I was told them by close personal friends. José Marques da Costa (Zequinha) was one of Vinicius’ very special friends; whenever he came to São Paulo he would stay at Zequinha’s house. Both Zequinha and his wife Regina were also very special friends of my wife and I. Whenever Vinicius came to São Paulo, Regina would call my wife on the phone and say, “Vinicius is here. Please come and join us.” So we would drive to Zequinha’s beautiful apartment...

Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard was a French physician, born in in a small city of Provence, in 1774.  Dr. Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard  - Wikimedia Commons   He never went to a medical school. But he had to go to the army during the French Revolution and worked as an assistant physician at a military hospital, and did it very successfully. He was then appointed deputy surgeon at another military hospital in Paris, and in 1799 he became a physician at L'Institution Royale des Sourds-Muets (National Institution for Deaf Mutes). In Paris, Itard began to work with Dr. René Laennec, a famous physician, the inventor of the stethoscope. Laennec was a few years younger than Itard, but had had a formal education at the university at Nantes and later became a professor of medicine at the Collège de France.  In 1803 Itard described pneumothorax. Laennec, a few years later, described the disease in more detail. Itard's Otology Book - Wikimedia Commons In 1821, Itard ...

In old times deaf people were considered mentally incompetent and lacked the civil rights of hearing persons. In the Middle Ages the Catholic Church often expressed the opinion that they could not be saved! This attitude persisted until the 16th century, when it was realized that deaf persons could be educated. Among the pioneers were Girolamo Cardamo (1501-1576), in Italy,  Father Pedro Ponce de Leon (1520-1584) and Pablo Bonet (1573-1633), in Spain, and George Dalgarno (1626-1787) in England. Many deaf children were educated, but this was done privately, in small groups. Schools for the deaf did not exist.  Abbot Charles Michel de l’Épée (1712-1789) founded, in 1775, the first school for deaf children in Paris. Samuel Heinicke (1727-1790) founded, in 1777, the first German school for deaf children, in Leipzig – this school still exists. L’Épée and Heinicke used different methods, that persist to the present days; l’Épée preferred sign language, Heinicke was in favor o...