1964
In 1964 the American orthopedic surgeon Lyman Smith (1912-1991) introduced chemonucleolysis 1) , a minimally invasive technique consisting only of a cannula and the proteolytic enzyme chymopapain, which is injected into the disc compartment to dissolve the displaced disc material.
Although the translabyrinthine approach was described by Panse in 1904 and first used to resect a cerebellopontine angle tumor by Quix in 1912, it was not until House published 47 resections with no mortalities in 1964 that the approach was truly popularized 2)
Salomón Hakim first identified the Idiopathic normal pressure hydrocephalus in 1957 at the Hospital San Juan de Dios in Bogotá, Colombia. Even after decades of international focus and thousands of publications on his disorder, Hakim's story remains largely untold.
Professor Hakim first published his thesis in 1964 and 6 case reports of NPH in The New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the Neurological Sciences in 1965. Hakim rose to the forefront of academic medicine as he described a newfound ability to reverse symptoms of “neurodegeneration” that had long been considered irreversible. 3).
Dr Pernkopf's Topographische anatomie des menschen (Topographical anatomy of man), in four volumes, was originally published in German. It had taken the author and his colleagues over twenty years to produce it, the first volume being published in 1937. It was translated into English in 1964. The Pernkopf's atlas was received with uniform acclaim in Europe and America and praised for its accuracy and the quality of its illustrations. A study compared its utility with that of Dr Frank Netter's Atlas of human anatomy, first published in 1989, with its 7th edition out in 2018.