Otitis media and human efforts to deal with it through time

This chapter describes, from a historical perspective, a multifactorial, multifaceted disease - otitis media - that has been highly prevalent through the ages. It shows how physicians from all over the world have approached this entity at different moments in history with the medical knowledge available at their particular time. This sequential description highlights how our current prevailing concepts in otitis media have evolved and developed. The history of otitis media teaches us that what at one time might have seemed to be the final truth was consistently surpassed and modified by new information that, in turn, became the final truth until it was surpassed again.