Heinrich Adolf Rinne

Heinrich Adolf Rinne was a German otologist, a physician specialising in diseases of the ear, born in Vlotho an der Weser on 24 January 1819 and dying on 26 July 1868. He received his doctorate from the University of Göttingen and practised medicine in that city, then worked as a physician in Sandstadt near Stade from 1857 and in Hildesheim from 1860. In 1855 he described the combined conductive process of the tympanic membrane and the ossicles of the middle ear. His name lives on in the Rinne test, a hearing test with a tuning fork that compares a patient's hearing by air conduction with hearing by bone conduction through the mastoid. He reasoned that if a person hears a sound longer through bone than through air, a disease is present somewhere in the conduction apparatus. The test was not generally recognised until after his death, when the otologists Friedrich Bezold and August Lucae publicised his work in the early 1880s. His writings include papers on the voice organ and the formation of speech, on the physiology of the human ear, and a book on materialism and ethical need in their relation to psychology.