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Sniffing out the evidence – COVID-19 and loss of sense of smell and taste

Louis Pasteur once observed: “In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind.” Professor Hopkins was certainly prepared when a few anecdotes of smell problems started to accumulate early in the pandemic’s course. Post-viral olfactory loss is nothing...

Innovative approaches to treating deafness

Shahar Taiber and Karen Avraham give us a summary of gene therapies for hearing loss, with an overview of limitations and what the future holds. Hearing loss is the most common sensory disorder. The last two decades have seen a...

The changing role of audiology

Audiology has changed dramatically in recent years. Cochlear implants and high power hearing aids have made hearing really available to children with essentially any degree of hearing loss. Those of us who have been in the field for a long...

Hearing loss and Alport syndrome

Alport syndrome (AS) includes a group of hereditary diseases caused by mutations in the COL4A3, COL4A4 or COL4A5 genes. These genes are responsible for the biosynthesis of α3, α4 and α5 collagen IV chains, which are located in the glomerular...

Clinical WG1. Establishing a standard for tinnitus: patient assessment and characterisation

Rilana Cima and Haúla Haider introduce an ambitious pan-European collaboration that seeks to establish guidelines for achieving best clinical practice for managing, assessing and treating patients with different tinnitus profiles. Tinnitus heterogeneity is the major reason for inconsistent results in...

Phineas Fletcher and The Purple Island

The Reverend Phineas Fletcher was a 17th century poet whose epic poem, The Purple Island describes the anatomy of the human body. Not only poets, but contemporary anatomists believed in two important concepts, correspondences and signatures. They thought that when...

A brief history of adenoidectomy - a glowing report of the post nasal space

The traditional adenoid curette more closely resembles a medieval torture device than an instrument of cure. Therefore it is not much of a surprise to learn that it has changed little since its invention almost 150 years ago. During that...

ENT and the Titanic

One otolaryngologist who perished on the ill-fated voyage of the RMS Titanic on 15 April 1912 was Dr Ernest Moraweck, a prominent physician with an interest in ENT (and ophthalmology), living in Frankfort, Kentucky, USA [1]. Moraweck was an inventive...

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]....