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Bartolomeo and Me

I’ve been getting these occasional earaches.
According to my ENT NP
it’s the pressure in my Eustachian tube.
”What can we do about it?” I ask him.
He suggests a steroidal nasal spray
used daily. “But it doesn’t hurt every day,” I say.
”Plus I don’t like the idea of steroids.”
He shrugs, looks at his shoes. “Try
the spray,” he says again. But instead
I look up Eustachian tube when I get home
which I vaguely remember from science class.
And I read all about Bartolomeo Eustachi,
the 16th century Italian anatomist
who lent his name to my tube. And I feel
better already. In the 1500s, medicine
was a mixed bag of superstition and nascent
scientific inquiry. Treatments were often ineffective
and painful. But Bartolomeo knew better.
He knew Hebrew and Arabic and Greek,
which gave him access to original medical treatises
in those languages. He obtained papal dispensation
to dissect cadavers from Santo Spirito Hospital
in Rome. He wrote a remarkable series of scientific works
on the anatomy of the kidney, the hearing apparatus,
the teeth and their structure, and the circulatory system,
including the lower vena cava and its valve,
now known as the Eustachian valve. You have
my ear, I whisper to Bartolomeo. And I think I hear
him whisper back: Who needs a daily steroidal spray
or those quack physicians with their humors
and noisome treatments, anyway?

—
Paul Hostovsky’s poems and essays appear widely online and in print. He has won a Pushcart Prize, two Best of the Net Awards, and has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Only Poems, The Writer’s Almanac, and the Best American Poetry blog. His newest book is Paul Hostovsky: More Selected Poems (FutureCycle Press, 2026).

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