[The vestibular organ throughout history]. / El organo vestibular en la historia.

ABSTRACT

AIMS AND DEVELOPMENT Our aim is to attempt to create a chronologically ordered and coherent corpus of the apparently scarce information that exists about the history of the vestibular organ, a component of the inner ear situated on both sides of the head in the petrous temporal bone. Its job, at least in humans, is to transmit sensory information about movements of the head to components of the central nervous system. Some of its more common disorders lead to syndromes that implicitly entail balance disorders, such as the case of the syndrome described by Prosper Meni re in the 19th century. Without ruling out the possible ancestral knowledge of the vertiginous processes associated with the inner ear, our objective is to review some of the aspects that anatomists, physiologists and prominent physicists have been involved in throughout history, i.e. elements that appeared between the 18th and mid 20th century and which have led to a fuller understanding of the morphological and functional aspects of the fundamental apparatus involved in the detection of gravity and inertia, shared by vertebrates the vestibular organ.