Hearing International

I am off on holidays this week, but hope you will enjoy this top post from 2015.         Audiologists have long known that noise damages the auditory mechanism and that high level noise over 85-90 dBA for a long period of time can cause deafness. But what does it take in sound levels to produce a truly

Remember the 1981 movie Chariots of Fire, the story of the 1924 Olympic track team? While Mike Murphy wasn’t a member or a coach of the famous 1924 team that won 32 medals in the Summer Olympics in Paris, the team owes its legacy to him. Murphy (1860-1913) was a sprinter, one of the first football coaches, and a premier track

The Newest in Hearing Technology IS NOT a Hearing Aid! People with hearing loss are not alone.  They are among 32 million Americans and 360 million individuals worldwide with hearing loss.  Roughly 1/3 of individuals over age 65 have a significant hearing impairment, making hearing loss the third most common chronic condition among older Americans.On the average, those with hearing

According to Pearce (2007),  Magnus Gustaf Retzius (1842–1919) initiated the anatomical studies of the semicircular apparatus. The physiologist Jean Pierre Flourens (1794–1867) in 1825 had observed that when a pigeon’s horizontal semicircular canal was destroyed, it went on turning horizontally in a circle. Purkinje (1787–1869) proved that changing the head position induced vertigo in man.   And then? …………… total silence

Another major player in the development of 19th century otology was the Hungarian otologist, Adam Politzer (1835-1920).   Born to a wealthy Jewish family in 1835 in Alberti about 35 miles southeast of Budapest, young Adam was schooled by the founders of the Modern Medical School of Vienna  where special interest was taken in his development by two influential people, Johann Ritter von Oppolzer (1808–1871) an Austrian physician, and the

Over the past few weeks we have been reviewing the development of the field of Otology.  Throughout time many have made contributions to the field, but study really took off after the development of the microscope in 1595.  Since that time history finds more individuals investigating the structure and function of the auditory system.  Moving into the 19th century there

Building upon the knowledge gained by earlier scholars such as Du Verney, Malpighi, Morgagni, Valsalva, Scarpa, Cortugno and others, the tools available to study structure and function in the nineteenth century facilitated a time of great discovery in Otology. Progression of the Microscope Many of the anatomical and physiological structures  of the ear are microscopic and the continued progression of microscope  technology played

At a time when lands and peoples were being discovered, the eighteenth century was also a great time of discovery in all areas of study, especially in Otology. The center of the world for science and technology was Europe and despite war, tyrannical monarchs, and various diseases, great strides were being made in the discovery of anatomical structures, their function and their specific roles

The Philosophical Pioneers of Otology While there are many pioneers of a discipline such as Otology that date back probably even before the earliest written material, Junior et al (2007) reviewed the history of Otorhinolaryngology and found that it has rich literature dating back to the Egyptians. In one of the best-known Egyptian scientific documents, Ebers’s scrolls, they found descriptions of battle wounds on temporal

In 1648, Dr. John Duverney was a small community physician in Feurs, France when on August 5th, his wife Antoinette, gave birth to a son, Guichard Joseph Duverney.  The life of a Forézien physician and his family in the 17th Century was  that of  routine.  Antoinette was responsible for the daily household routine, washing clothes, food and other chores while John attended to