- Person
- Robert Bárány
- Lived
- 1876–1936
- Field
- Otology
- From
- Austrian-Swedish
The story
Robert Bárány was born in Vienna in 1876, the eldest of six children of Ignác Bárány, a Hungarian Jew who worked as a bank official and estate manager, and Maria Hock, the daughter of a Prague scientist. A childhood bout of bone tuberculosis left him with a stiff knee and an early interest in medicine. He graduated from the University of Vienna medical school in 1900 and in 1903 joined Adam Politzer’s famous ear clinic.
Ear doctors of the day often syringed patients’ ears with water. Bárány noticed that this sometimes made patients dizzy and set their eyes flicking rhythmically to one side, a reflex called nystagmus. Cold water made the eyes flick one way and warm water the other, while water at body temperature had no effect. He worked out the reason: the temperature change makes the fluid inside the nearby semicircular canal of the inner ear sink or rise, and that flow stimulates the balance sensors exactly as turning the head would. He published his studies of this caloric reaction in 1906, along with a pointing test for balance and brain disorders, and in 1907 described the rotating chair used to provoke the same reflexes.
The caloric test made it possible, for the first time, to check the balance organ of each ear separately and to tell whether one side was damaged. That allowed precise diagnosis of inner-ear disease and, as the Nobel Foundation notes, had a major impact on its treatment, including surgery. Bárány learned that he had won the 1914 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine while a prisoner of war in Russia; he was freed in 1916 and spent the rest of his life as a professor at Uppsala in Sweden.
More than a century later the caloric test remains a standard part of the examination of people with dizziness and vertigo, now usually recorded with video goggles in videonystagmography. It helps doctors identify conditions such as vestibular neuritis and Ménière’s disease and decide on treatment. The Bárány chair is still used to teach pilots about spatial disorientation, and the international society for balance research, the Bárány Society, bears his name.
Why it matters
Patients with dizziness and vertigo around the world are still diagnosed with Bárány’s caloric test, which shows doctors whether each inner ear’s balance organ is working.
About Robert Bárány
Vienna-born ear doctor who explained how the inner ear controls balance; his caloric test, warm or cold water in the ear, is still used to diagnose dizziness and vertigo. Nobel Prize 1914.
Sources
- Robert Bárány, Facts NobelPrize.org
- Robert Bárány, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Róbert Bárány Life in the Fast Lane (LITFL)
- Robert Bárány Wikipedia
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