forked probe held in the pharynx and by traction against this the sponge was dragged into the pharynx, bringing the polypi with it. Paul of Aegina was the last of the Byzantine compilers and a physician of high repute practising in Alexandria until his death in AD 690. He advised that a knotted cord be introduced into the nose and passed out by way of the palate and mouth. Then, “drawing it with both hands, we saw away, as it were, with the knots the fleshy bodies…”²⁴⁶ Fallopius was, amongst his many other achievements, also an important figure in rhinology, for he invented the the wire snare for the removal of nasal polypi. Notice how he does not give too many specific technical details away:

I take a silver tube which is neither too broad nor too narrow, then a brass or other metal wire, sufficiently thick, preferably the iron wire from which harpsicords are made. This doubled I place in the tube, so that from this wire a loop is made at one end of the tube by which, used in the nares, I remove the polypi.²⁴⁷

(c) The Tragedy of Benjamin Babington and his Forgotten Disease.

Osier Weber Rendu disease should more properly be known under the name of Benjamin Babington who was appointed to the staff of Guy’s Hospital in 1837. In this he was perhaps aided by his parents who took the precaution of giving him the middle name of Guy to commemorate his birth in the building. He qualified in medicine from the University of Cambridge at the relatively late age of thirty-one following service in the Royal Navy and the East India Company. He is also considered to be the inventor of the laryngoscope, or as he called it the “glottiscope”. Hodgkin referred to it as the speculum laryngis. It was Babington who first described hereditary haemorrhagic telangiectasia, in 1865, noting the condition in five consecutive generations of one family.²⁴⁸ However many others took to describing the condition later:- Rendu in 1896, Osier in 1901 and Weber in 1907 and these names are commonly associated with it. His achievement is all the more notable for the fact that at the time he was writing this up hereditary disease was, except in the most general terms, unknown in clinical medicine. Mendel’s work of 1867 lay buried until the turn of the century and it was not until the early 1900s that the terms dominant and recessive inheritance were applied, following the work of Archibald Garrod. A pretender to the crown of discoverer of hereditary haemorrhagic telangiectasia is H Gawen Sutton who wrote in the Medical Mirror.²⁴⁹ His claim however depends on one short paragraph:

Stay updated, free articles. Join our Telegram channel

Join