Joseph Toynbee

Joseph Toynbee ( born December 30, 1815 in Heckington ( Lincolnshire ), † June 7, 1866 in London) was an English physician and otologist. Joseph Toynbee was the father of the popular economist and economic historian Arnold Toynbee, his nephew was the philosopher of history Arnold Joseph Toynbee (1889-1975), with which the penultimate is often confused due to the similarity in name.

Life and work

He was the second son of a total of fifteen children of the wealthy land owner and farmer George Toynbee ( 1783-1865 ). His first wife and mother of Joseph Toynbee was Elizabeth Cullen ( 1785-1829 ). After several years of private teaching, he attended King 's Lynn Grammar School in Norfolk. Toynbee took his medical studies at the age of seventeen. He began medical training then William Wade at Westminster General Dispensary in Gerrard Street in the Soho district. He heard among others, Benjamin Collins Brodie. His anatomical studies he made under the guidance of George Derby Dermott (1802-1847) at the Hunterian Medical School, Great Windmill Street, where he also received the privilege as prosector to act.

Later he moved to St George 's and University College Hospitals, where his interest had been awakened for the pathology of the ear. In 1838, they took him as a member of the Royal College of Surgeons in London. In the same year he was appointed to the assistant curator at the Hunterian Museum, which was under the direction of Richard Owen.

In August 1846 he married Harriet Holmes was born ( 1822-1897 ), daughter of Nathaniel Holmes. The couple ultimately had nine children: Gertrude (* 1848), William ( * 1849), Lucy (* 1850), Arnold ( 1852-1883 ), Rachel (* 1853), Paget Jackson ( 1855-1932 ), Mary H. ( * 1856), Grace Ridge pole (* 1856) and Harry Valpy Toynbee ( 1861-1941 ).

He described in 1850 under the name molluscous tumor and later sebeaceous tumor growths in the ear, but the Toynbee as the primary Balggeschwülste ( by a bellows limited tumors composed of epidermic scales ) of the ear canal looked at her, but rather resembled a cholesteatoma. He again saw its origins in the sebaceous glands.

In 1857 Toynbee was a surgeon and lecturer at St Mary's Hospital in Paddington, London. While working as a surgeon at St James's and St George's Dispensary Toynbee lived on Argyll Place in London. It was the phase in his life in which he became a pioneer in the field of otology.

He studied the Eustachian tube and the tympanic membrane and tried to restore attempts, the tympanoplasty.

Toynbee had observed that patients with a perforated eardrum subjectively for a short time again completely or nearly normal hearing, as when liquid had filled the opening in the affected ear drum. Disappeared these " Flüssigkeitsplombe ", also the improvement of the hearing was over. This observation took Toynbee to develop something that should close the tympanic membrane defect durable. His ideas were based on experimental therapies that had already other colleagues carried out.

In 1853 he used in place of a small cotton ball, as they had ( 1805-1869 ) applied before James Yearsley, a round Guttaperchaplatte, which was fixed at the center of a silver wire for insertion through the external auditory canal. The silver wire ended ring in order to easily could again remove the entire device. Although the silver wire from the patients was often bothersome, you took over the Toynbee'sche model ( artificial tympanic membrane) and developed it further, so about August Lucae in Berlin.

The patient had to practice dealing with this Toynbee prosthesis; he learned how to use the Guttaperchaplatte properly and thus gradually increase the wearing time. At night, the prosthesis was removed.

Toynbee worked intensively with individual symptoms of the various diseases of the ear and examined relationships through changes to their pathological substrate. So he obduzierte a large number - about 2000 ear sections - of hearing organs. For Toynbee, it was always amazing how many changes were found in the autopsies on the ears, at the deceased who felt no pathological signs or malfunctions during his lifetime.

One of his students was also Ádám Politzer, who personally stayed around the year 1861 in London. Likewise, practiced and studied August Lucae Berlin with him as his pupil and can be viewed and also Anton Friedrich von Troeltsch worked on his study trip through Dublin, Glasgow and London in 1855 at Toynbee.

In 1841 he had then entirely devoted to otology, a hitherto hardly recognized specialist in medicine. In 1864 he was finally appointed to the chair of diseases of the ear at St Mary's Hospital in London.

Toynbee tried to cure the hearing loss of the Regent Queen Victoria by injections in the ear.

Joseph Toynbee died on July 7, 1866 from an accidental inhalation of chloroform or cyanide in his office, consulting room. Obviously, he conducted a self- experiment in which he accidentally inhaled the two substances to test a cure for tinnitus.

Man buried Toynbee in the churchyard of St Mary's at Wimbledon.

Toynbee maneuver

With the " Toynbee maneuver " is understood in the medical practice, a method of tubal function or an eardrum mobility test, which goes back to the namesake. It represents a kind is the reverse of the Valsalva maneuver; while the Toynbee maneuver lowers the middle ear pressure, increases him the Valsalva maneuver. When Toynbee maneuver, the patient is stopped a negative pressure in the nasopharynx to produce such a way that the patient swallows with holding one's nose. This is physiologically observed an inward movement of the eardrum. If a tube ventilation disorder exist, the eardrum movement lacks in direct observation with an otoscope or shows the tympanogram ( tympanometry ) corresponding deviations.

Works (selection)

• On the structure of the membrana tympani in the human ear. Richard Taylor, London 1851
• On the use of an artificial membrana tympani in cases of deafness: dependent upon perforation or destruction of the natural organ. J. Churchill, London 1857
• A Descriptive Catalogue of Preparations Illustrative of the Diseases of the Ear in the Museum of Joseph Toynbee. J. Churchill, London 1857
• The Diseases of the Ear: Their Nature, Diagnosis, and Treatment. Blanchard and Lea, 1860
• Hints on the Formation of Local museum. Robert Hardwicke, 1863