Róbert Bárány

In 1909 he married Ida Felicitas Berger and the couple was blessed with two sons and a daughter.

His eldest son Ernst Herbert Bárány was born on August 8, 1910. Ernst was a physician and a Professor of Pharmacology at the ‘University of Uppsala’ and also a member of the ‘Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences’.

His second son Franz Barany, born on May 28, 1914, was an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the ‘Caroline Institute’, Stockholm.

He was born on April 22, 1876, in Vienna, Austria-Hungary in a Hungarian-Jew family to Ignáz Bárány and Maria Hock as their eldest child among six children. His father was an estate manager and bank official and his mother was the daughter of a renowned Prague scientist.

He suffered from tuberculosis of the bones as a young kid that caused ankylosis resulting into permanent stiffness of his knee joint. Presumably this illness invoked in him an interest in the subject of medicine. However, the disability could not restrict him either from walking in the hills or from playing tennis.

He was a brilliant student and remained in top form all through his school and college life.

He studied medicine at the ‘University of Vienna’ and on April 2, 1900, he received his doctorate degree.

He then moved to Frankfurt am Main where he joined ‘Städtisches Krankenhaus’ as an assistant to Professor Carl Harko von Noorden and received training in internal medicine for a year.

On October 3, 1903, he was appointed as demonstrator in the ‘Otological Clinic’ of the ‘University of Vienna’, where he worked under Professor Adam Politzer, who was the founder of otology in Austria.

He was fascinated by the rhythmic nystagmus produced when fluid was syringed in the ear and found out that it was associated with temperature of fluid and thus investigated the aspects that govern labyrinthine stimulation.

He had this observation while he was serving as a doctor in Vienna. One day while he syringed a cold fluid into the external auditory canal of a patient in order to relieve the latter from giddy spells, he observed that the latter experienced nystagmus as well as vertigo. He then syringed warm fluid and observed that the patient still experienced nystagmus but this time on the opposite direction.

These observations led him to theorize that the endolymph, a fluid present in the membranous labyrinth of the inner ear, was falling when in cold state and rising in warm state and its flowing direction was giving proprioceptive signal to the vestibular organ. In this regard he conducted a series of experiments, which he termed as the caloric reaction. His contributing research work paved way for surgical treatment of vestibular organ diseases.

However a question always did the rounds in Vienna as to who made the observations first, as it was considered that Bárány initiated on the labyrinth after witnessing such demonstrations on experimental animals by Alexander Spitzer.

He was awarded the ‘Nobel Prize for Physiology’ or Medicine in 1914. However due to his incarceration in a war camp prison by the Russian Army, he received the prize from the King of Sweden at Stockholm in 1916 after his release.