I met Edoardo Arslan in the magical environment of Ferrara, the lovely Venice and the elegant Padua. After graduating from the Faculty of Medicine at the National University of Mexico, I practised the rudiments of audiology for two years at Mexico General Hospital. I knew that it was essential to learn much more, however, and that this could be achieved in very few places in Europe, such as the University Hospital in Ferrara, then headed by Professor Ettore Bocca. I arrived there in the early days of 1968 and stayed until the spring of 1969, having the opportunity and the privilege to learn from an exceptional group of teachers, some of them outstanding, and who also became great friends, men like Antonio Antonelli, Gianpietro Teatini and, a little later, Edoardo Arslan.
How many times did we meet? It is impossible to know! We were together at dozens or hundreds of training courses, round tables, and conferences: in Mexico, in the States of Sinaloa, Puebla, Yucatán, Quintana Roo and in Mexico City, without forgetting our ‘long days of hard work’ in Acapulco, where we designed a research protocol to study ‘the hearing of the lobster’. We were also together in France and the UK, in the Netherlands, Austria, Germany, Poland, Spain, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, and in all corners of the much loved and admired Italy too. In the Americas we were together in Guatemala, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Chile and Argentina.
I always admired the punctiliousness with which Edoardo thoroughly studied his patients in Ferrara, Padua and Treviso, but I probably appreciated his brilliant conclusions even more, and his ability to create focused intervention programmes. He literally was a ‘doctor of people’, in every sense of the word. Starting from the intricacies of applied research, he transformed the mysteries of auditory neurophysiology into a diagnostic and therapeutic enlightenment that he both applied to his patients and taught like a true professor to the multitude of students who wanted to learn from his experience, judgment, knowledge and scientific restlessness. He was a pioneer of modern audiology and a strenuous defender of the identity of our medical speciality, an identity that he pursued with great character, a rigorous quixotic attachment and a special generosity. Many of us benefited from his advice, which was always given with affection and never conceited, most often bestowed with happiness and joie de vivre.
Edoardo enjoyed all forms of art: an avid reader, he admired painting, sculpture, architecture and particularly music. He appreciated art as a gesture of love, a resistance to conformity, a form of participation and invention, ideal or sentiment and, thanks to all of this, as a spiritual sublimation of life. He always sought in the arts all that is transcendent, superior, abstract and spiritual, and this ongoing search made him an exceptional man and a true artist in his own right.
I am convinced that, in the purest style of Bertrand Russell, his life was guided by a longing for love, the pursuit of knowledge, an endless pity for mankind's suffering, and a desire to know why the sun appears, the rain falls, the stars shine or the comets travel. However, despite his approach to everything that is supernatural and his comfortable situation in life, he always kept his human compassion and, with all the strength of his convictions, he never accepted social injustice, pain, oppression, pigheadedness, hunger, loneliness or poverty.
Mysterious but full of light, affectionate but sometimes difficult, complicated but gentle, uncompromising but ready to change his mind, Edoardo grew up in truth and goodness, knowing that life is not what life gives to us, but what we give to life. He gave us a lot and that is why, rather than be saddened by his absence, we should rejoice and thank God every day for the huge privilege of having been able to be close to his unforgettable figure.
San Jerónimo, México DF
In memory of the coffin-raising ceremony at Padua University one month ago. 2 June 2013.