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The artificial eardrum: how an eggshell membrane fed a German ENT family

In the pre-antibiotic era, purulent otitis media often resulted in a permanent eardrum perforation with hearing loss. In addition to pig or fish bladders, eggshell membranes and cigarette paper were used as eardrum prostheses. I have vivid personal boyhood memories...

The father of the history of otology

This year marks the centenary of the death of Adam Politzer (1835-1920). He has been described as the Father of Otology [1] and was certainly the most influential person in otology in the latter half of the 19th century [2]....

What’s hidden in hidden hearing loss?

In order to truly understand the many key aspects of acquired sensorineural hearing loss, the role of cochlear synaptopathy or ‘hidden hearing loss’ must be considered. Dan Guo and Sharon Kujawa review and summarise what we know to date, including...

Genetics and the newborn hearing screen: the future is now

Eliot Shearer shares the progress being made with newborn hearing screening 60 years on from where it started, and future directions for identifying hearing loss using physiologic, genetic and cCMV screening. Newborn screening had its birth in the early 1960s,...

What you need to know about recent advances in genetics of hearing loss in the newborn

Identifying the underlying genetic cause of hearing loss in newborns can improve dramatically the early diagnosis and appropriate intervention. Hearing loss is the most common sensory disorder at birth, affecting approximately two out of 1000 newborns [1]. Congenital impaired hearing...

Surgeons and swearing

We will all know colleagues who have raised the act of swearing to an art form; just as Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It could cut a workmate in half with a well-placed swear word, surgeons can be equally...

Multi-channel cochlear implants: past, present and future

Forty years since the first multi-channel devices were implanted, who better than Ingeborg Hochmair, who has been a key figure throughout their evolution, to offer her thoughts on the past, present and future of multi-channel cochlear implants? Read on for...

Secrets of the listening brain: what measuring the brain can tell us about hearing aid use and more

In a typical audiology clinic, on any given day, a person is waiting to see an audiologist to get a hearing aid (HA). It might have taken over 10 years to get to this point of considering a hearing aid(s)...

How entrepreneurs can integrate hearables into their clinic

Brian Taylor provides an interesting perspective on market segmentation of the hearing impaired population, and how as clinicians and entrepreneurs we need to be able to recognise the different approaches that are required to address the large percentage of the...

Not just the scissors: the story of Myron Metzenbaum

Myron Metzenbaum was born in Cleveland, Ohio (USA) in 1876, the fourth of nine children. As a young man, he worked in the family’s linen store, where his father was well known to be very kind to the less fortunate...