[Development of the surgery of chronic otitis]

For on a strictly conceptual level, today as well as yesterday we find the two main streams of thoughts shared by otologists. Some put the emphasis on the exeresis of lesions which are mainly cholesteatoma, at the agreed expense of hearing. Others are anxious to conciliate lesion exeresis and conservation, even restoration of hearing. The first streams of thoughts outnumbered the others during the first half of the century. Thus that was the triumph of the radical mastoïdectomy, due to the works of Kurster, Laufal and Stacke, then those of Bergman, Barany, Bondy, Beyer and Voss. Today the heirs to that philosophy have converted this surgery, in open technique tympanoplasty. In the second streams of the ... there was Heath in 1904, then Bondy in 1908, and especially Sourdille in France, who in his thesis, described antro-atticotomy with conservation of the ossicular chain. The state of mind he was in as early as 1918 makes him one of the fathers of tympanoplasty, at least so we think. Unfortunately for him, he was ahead of his time and it wasn't until the second half of the century that the heirs to his philosophy could fulfill the vow which was to conciliate lesion exeresis and restoration of hearing. To be frank, they enjoyed the use of antibiotics and surgery microscope, without which tympanoplasty whose initiators were Zollner and Wullstein would have never been possible. A lot of improvement remains to be done as far as chronic otitis surgery is concerned.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)