The international polygon of neurootological knowledge makers.

T he historical success of humans (i.e., Homo sapiens) is based on their senses and their interaction with their thoughts, their selves, and their actions in using their hands and their tools. Knowledge can be built up in individuals through many sensorial percepts and experiences that grow during a lifetime. Humans, who have a history of perhaps 3 million years in this world, also have developed an interindividual knowledge that had to be handed down from one generation to the next. Of this long history of some 3 million years-so paleontologists are teaching us-mainly approximately 10,000 years of the most recent history show the development of an extracorporeal knowledge, set out in creative works (pictures, sculptures, and scripts) and lasting longer than the life spans of their authors. Because humans have developed the ability to write and to read, they can make the knowledge of individuals and groups mobile: from city to city, from country to country, and from generation to generation. During the last millennium, and especially during the latest centuries, modern scientific knowledge containing the seeds of progress was concentrated in the schools and universities of Europe and Anglo-America. During this period, the growth of knowledge-and the new knowledgewas always related to universities, where it was concentrated especially in the libraries. These libraries were used as the basis for teaching students, continuing cultural standards and establishing the basics of knowledgemaking among lecturers and professors. With respect to the relationship among students, societies, and governments, colleges and universities served as degree-granting institutions of higher education. Traditionally, each college was a component part of a cooperative body called university. The word is an abbreviation of the Latin, "Universitas Magistrorum et Scholarium." There, the knowledge necessary for higher education was concentrated; it gave both students and lecturers an advantage in their work and as legal protection. In some universities, particularly European institutions, students began their higher education with specialized studies because their general education already was completed in secondary schools. Universities began to develop in Western Europe in the thirteenth century. Most well-known were those at Paris, Prague, and Bologna. Old, established knowledge and even the process of generating and introducing new knowledge was concentrated in and around special universities. Instruction in medieval universities often took the form of lectures, with teachers who were called masters, who read aloud from a text while students followed along. Western European universities developed as students migrated to various places where noted teachers lectured on subjects of particular interest to them. Language was no barrier because lectures and disputations were conducted in the universal tongue (i.e., Latin). In the seventeenth century, Bologna was the great university for medicine and biology. In the United States, in New England, Calvinists founded Harvard College in 1636, the oldest American institution of learning, which later was called Harvard University. During the nineteenth century, German universities became influential sources of scholarly research and examples of academic freedom. The University of Berlin was noted for philosophy, Gbttingen for literature and mathematics, Heidelberg for mathematics and classics, Leipzig for psychology, lena for pedagogy , and Wiirzburg for medicine. In Wiirzburg, for instance, Virchow wrote his famous pathology, Corti discovered the organ of hearing in the inner ear, von Troelsch established otology as a new discipline within medicine, Roentgen discovered x-rays and, among others, the first department of neurootology was organized there. Many students from foreign countries obtained doctoral degrees from German universities. Medical education is a process by which individuals acquire and maintain the skills necessary for the effective practice of medicine. To train as a conventional doctor in the Western world, a person needs to have achieved a good level of understanding in the sciences