The Laryngo-Fantome of Carlo Labus. A Precious Teaching Tool with Great Evocative Power

The Camillo Golgi Museum is a small museum of the Pavia University, born in the premises that housed the General Pathology laboratory, directed between the end of the nineteenth century and the first twenty years of the twentieth century by Camillo Golgi (1843-1926), winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1906 for his contribution to neuroanatomy. The Museum preserves a particular object, the “Laryngo-Fantome” of Carlo Labus (1844-1909) for laryngoscopic operations, marketed by Ferdinando Baldinelli (1835-1906) and purchased by Golgi in 1883. The instrument was used to train students in laryngoscopy surgery operations. It is a metal model that represents the front half of the head with the mouth, pharynx and larynx, modelled according to the natural conformation. On the back of the head there was a small drawer in which a piece of paper was placed (to simulate a foreign body to be removed). The extraction took place with the support of a laryngoscopic mirror. The model was inserted into an electrical circuit together with the pliers that the operator had to use for extraction. If during the operation he had touched any point on the walls of the throat, the electrical circuit would have closed, preventing the view of the operating field. This is one of the first examples of automation programmed to self-correct thanks to a pioneering use of electricity. The tool is significant for its educational usefulness, testified by its presence in the fundamental work of Luigi Vittorio Nicolai (1853-1922), especially if it is ideally inserted (and presented to the public) in the evolution of educational aids used in the medical field (drawings and engravings, anatomical preparations, wax models) which show the search for an increasingly effective representation of the human body and greater interactivity.