 
The laryngoscopy. From GarcÃa, 1884
Imagine the pressure of being born into a family that included three of the most famous singers of the 19th century. The strain on young Manuel GarcÃa must have been immense. His mother, Joaquina Sitchès, sang in an opera company with his father, Manuel del Populo Vincent GarcÃa, who was Rossini’s favorite tenor. The elder GarcÃa was also the foremost voice teacher in Europe. He trained two of his daughters, who both became world renowned: MarÃa Felicia (who is remembered as “La Malibran”) and Pauline Ferdinande Viardot-GarcÃa. The young GarcÃa was also groomed to become a professional singer, but had neither the desire nor the talent to compete with the rest of his family. So in 1830, he ran away from home and joined the French army as a medical orderly.
Medicine captured young GarcÃa’s imagination. He hung around the surgical wards and the pathologist’s dissection tables. He was particularly interested in anything to do with the larynx, or what many people call the “voice box.” Convinced that his father’s teaching methods had ruined his voice, GarcÃa believed that the more he understood about the vocal chords, the more he would understand how to sing without pain and frustration.
When GarcÃa’s family lured him back home a year or so later, convincing him to join their school as a voice teacher, his fascination with the anatomy and physiology of the larynx persisted. He began experimenting with animal windpipes collected from butcher shops and slaughter houses. He brought his specimens home to perform anatomical dissections and enlisted his now quite famous sister Pauline Viardot in helping with experiments as well. Viardot would insert a bellows into the lower end of the trachea while GarcÃa manipulated the larynx in order to determine how different types of sounds were generated. As Viardot later commented, “You would have imagined that these [experiments] would have disgusted me. But it was not so. He would give me a pair of bellows, which I would insert in these windpipes, one after the other, and blow hard. Heavens! What extraordinary sounds they used to emit” (Mackinlay, 100). GarcÃa used the results of his studies to experiment with his own voice and then began applying what he was learning from these experiments to his teaching.
About this time, the elder GarcÃa died, leaving his world-famous music school in the hands of his rebellious son. Surprisingly, GarcÃa the younger not only kept up the reputation of the school, but actually increased its importance by training a second generation of singers who went on to dominate operatic singing around the world.
But this success alone was not enough for GarcÃa. While dissecting his animal windpipes, he had conceived a passion to view his own vocal chords as he was singing and to test out his teaching methods while actually practicing them. The task seemed impossible. Physicians had been trying for nearly a century to view the larynx of a living patient without success. Sticking a tube large enough to shine a light down someone’s throat would cause them to gag or vomit. Pushing a mirror to the back of the throat didn’t work either, because the larynx is a few inches down the trachea, hiding in the dark. One needed to shine a light down the throat, too, which necessitated the use of a tongue depressor. Sticking a mirror and a tongue depressor into a patient’s throat wasn’t any better than forcing a tube into it. Many physicians considered the problem insoluble.
Garcia viewing his own larynx
GarcÃa was not to be put off. One day, in September of 1854, he was walking along the Palais Royale in Paris when a flash of sunlight off a window inspired the idea of using sunlight directed off a mirror to illuminate the back of the throat. There would be enough reflected light to illuminate the larynx as well. It immediately struck GarcÃa that he would require a second mirror placed at the back of the throat in such a position as to reflect the image of the vocal cords back out of his mouth. Obtaining a hand-held mirror to reflect sunlight into mouth was easy, but where was he to obtain a very small mirror placed at the correct angle at the end of a handle long enough to reach the back of his throat? As a result of his earlier anatomical experimentation, GarcÃa knew where to look for this second mirror, and serendipity smiled a second time: “I went straight to Charriere, the [Parisian] surgical instrument maker, and asking if he happened to possess a small mirror with a long handle, was informed that he had a little dentist’s mirror which had been one of the failures of the London Exhibition in I85I. I bought it for 6 francs” (Kernan, 616).
The rest is medical history, as GarcÃa became the first person to ever see live vocal chords as they were making sound. In his own words, “I placed against the uvula the little mirror which I had heated in warm water and carefully dried, then flashing upon its surface with a hand mirror a ray of sunlight, I saw at once to my great joy, the glottis open before me, and so fully exposed that I could perceive a portion of the trachea. When my excitement had subsided, I began to examine what was passing before my eyes. The glottis silently opening and shutting and moving in action and phonation filled me with wonder and admiration….” (Kernan, 616).
Read in Full:Â http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/imagine/201009/can-singer-make-scientific-discovery-the-case-manuel-garc
 
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