The brief history of laryngoscope: from lyric theater to operating theater

Tracheal intubation is one of the most widely used manoeuvres and laryngoscope is one of the most used devices in medicine. The first mentioned laryngoscopy is attributed to the Roman physician Aulus Cornelius Celsus. In the following centuries the contributions of Andreas van Wesel, known also with his Italian name Vesalio, of the English scientists Robert Hooke and Benjamin Guy Babington and the efforts of the German-Italian physician Philipp Bozzini and, particularly, of the Spanish singing teacher Manuel Patricio Rodríguez García were important. The ancestor of the laryngoscope used today was built by Alfred Kirstein, while the straight blades were designed by Robert Arden Miller and the curve blades by Robert Reynold Macintosh, respectively in 1941 in United States and in 1943 in United Kingdom. Only with Henry Harrington Janeway the laryngoscope lost its diagnostic function and became the essential device for tracheal intubation. Nowadays, the “digital revolution” of 21th century has brought newer technology to the science of tracheal intubation, and the GlideScope, a laryngoscope incorporating a video camera connected to a high resolution LCD monitor designed by the surgeon John Allen Pacey, is one of the most recent devices