Surgery related to histopathology in chronic inflammatory middle-ear disease

The world in which Toynbee carried out his clinical and scientific work, from 1838 to his death in 1866, was an entirely different one to our own, lacking all the means of treatment, that we have at our disposal today. Toynbee is remembered above all as a scientist. Systematically he set out to gather histological information in order to penetrate to the depth of the disease processes. He was the first person to conduct extensive temporal bone studies, starting by sectioning and examining a series of 41 bones (Toynbee, 1841) and progressing to a final report in the 1860's when his collection comprised well over 2,000 temporal bones. He described alterations in the inner ear; he demonstrated the otosclerotic fixation of the stapes and, in a large series of bones, he depicted the multitude of histopathological changes seen in the middle ear in chronic otitis media.