A personal history of stapedectomy

Aristotle has said the essential ingredient of tragedy is first hubris. Fame leads to the hubris that offends the gods, who send great punishment. This is so true in the history of stapedectomy. The three distinct eras of surgery for otosclerosis teach us a lot about what happens in science and in life. The first stapes era began in Europe, ahead of its time, and in those halcyon days before the turn of the century, the Belle Epoch, proceeded, uncorrected to its tragic extreme, and then was stopped suddenly, quite rightly, by the establishment. The fenestration era proceeded to an extreme, when its technical master Julius Lempert would allow no criticism or improvement in "his" one-stage endaural technique, however good, nor would he accept the new mobilization and stapedectomy operations, and he and it ended badly. The fact that Jenkins and Holmgren would make an opening in the lateral semicircular canal and then close it in the epitympanum, not open to the ear canal, to expect to improve hearing is amazing. Until Sourdille went to Stockholm and saw one closed fenestration operation performed by Holmgren and devised his "open to the ear canal technique," the closed fenestration operation was not reasonable. Then Sourdille came to New York City, and Lempert heard him speak and read and reread his publication and greatly improved on his operation. It was Lempert's one-stage endaural open operation that gave the fenestration operation the worldwide acceptance it gained. The second stapedectomy era began before the fenestration era ended with the accidental and originally unrecognized mobilization of the stapes by Rosen and my resurrection of stapedectomy. I realized in reading the literature of the past that stapedectomy was not necessarily fatal to the ear or the patient as was generally believed, and what was needed was to seal the oval window with a living elastic membrane and reconstruct the sound-conducting mechanism of the middle ear with a biocompatible implant prosthesis to make it successful. But for me, in 1955-1956, the "Zeitgeist" was finally right. I realized the stapes could be removed and covered the oval window with a vein graft, and Harry Treace made me a biocompatible implant prosthesis out of the newly discovered Teflon. For a new technology to be accepted, it must be much better than what it replaces, and stapedectomy was much better than fenestration. In the new microsurgical era of otology that began, improvements in the stapedectomy operation came from everywhere and were readily accepted. Stapedectomy has now become so successful, like many treatments in medicine, the problem has now largely disappeared. If the measles virus is the cause of the growth of the otosclerotic focus, as it seems to be, then vaccination against measles eventually will eliminate the hearing loss of otosclerosis completely. What the history of stapedectomy reveals is the truth of the quotation from Ecclesiastes, "There is nothing new under the sun." Progress is only made when the Zeitgeist is right, by someone who puts together the truths of the past with the new discoveries of the present.