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Imaging and management of head and neck vascular anomalies

Vascular anomalies are a diffuse spectrum of abnormalities which often involve the head, neck and oral cavity. They are frequently misnamed, often being generically labelled as haemangiomas. This lack of basic understanding can cause confusion leading to a cascade of...

Freud’s Friend, Fliess

Wilhelm Fliess, a Berlin rhinologist, was for many years Sigmund Freud’s closest friend and confidant. He was born in Poland in 1858. In 1887, he visited Vienna for postgraduate studies, and met the famous psychoanalyst, Freud [1]. They were immediate...

Allergy – what’s in a name?

Allergy is defined as an “abnormal immune reaction to an ordinarily harmless substance” [1], however the meaning of the word has taken many forms since its introduction in 1906 by Austrian Paediatrician and Immunologist, Clemens von Pirquet [2]. Combining his...

A ‘rye’ tail – the fatal illness of Lord Boringdon, a Regency tragedy

The anonymous privately-printed book, Some Account of Lord Boringdon’s Accident, describes in deferential terms a case of aspiration of a foreign body and its sequelae. Today aspirated foreign bodies are serious but curable injuries; before the invention of the bronchoscope...

Erwin Geising and the fall of the Third Reich

It’s mid 1944. The allies have landed at Normandy, the Germans have abandoned Rome and are retreating from the Russians on the eastern front. The Fuhrer was in way over his head and out of his depth. Watching this series...

The first compact auriscope: the 1865 speculum auris of Dr Brunton

Bringing light into darkness can also be a task for the physician. With the advent of endoscopy (initially by reflecting light into body cavities), new methods of diagnosis and treatment became available to the otologist. In 1865, the Scotsman John...