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The voice of the voice went silent forever—Prof. Hans Victor von Leden, MD, ScD, died on 5 March 2014, at his home in Los Angeles at the age of 95 after a serious pneumonia. Born in Breslau, Silesia, now Poland, on 20 November 1918, he followed his father who emigrated to the USA in the late 1930s when realizing the threatening Nazi development in Germany. After medical graduation at Chicago’s Loyola University in 1941, he specialized in otolaryngology and plastic surgery at Mayo Clinic in Rochester and consecutively worked as a throat specialist in Chicago. In 1961, von Leden and his wife, Mary Louise, moved to Los Angeles, where he became a professor at UCLA Medical School and opened his Institute of Laryngology and Voice Disorders. In 1966, he took over the Chair of Biocommunication at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Additionally, he worked as a consultant to the United States Navy, the Julliard School of Music, New York, and was member of the Honorary Staff of Lenox Hill Hospital, New York, and Curador of the Universidade Moderna, Portugal. Hans von Leden retired from his university work in 1985.

Care of the voice was the nucleus of all his professional life. He created a high level of clinical competence, where he had a solid basis from profound studies on physiology and pathophysiology of voice production. He became an outstanding expert, a go-to doctor for voice professionals of all kinds, be they singers, actors, attorneys, teachers, pastors, or politicians. He pioneered in the field of microsurgery of the larynx to restore and to improve vocal function.

Von Leden recited the exact day in the fall of 1963, that he was in a bar of the Roosevelt Hotel in New York, where he and Godfrey Arnold discussed surgical potential for the enhancement of vocal function, “and we decided that this modality needed a comprehensive designation. In a discussion of potential alternatives, I first mentioned the term “phonosurgery”, and we agreed to adopt and publicize this designation”. [The History of Phonosurgery. In: Ford CN, Bless DM (1991) Phonosurgery: assessment and surgical management of voice disorders. New York, Raven Press, pp 3–24].

His wide experience is documented in 21 medical and legal textbooks and the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 149 original scientific articles, 13 scientific motion pictures, and numerous lectures at universities in the United States and 26 foreign countries.

To establish and to guarantee worldwide professional care of the voice, he created the Committee on the Care of the Voice in the frame of the International Federation of Otorhinolaryngological Societies (IFOS), and it is successfully active up to the present. Dr. Hans von Leden also took the initiative to found on 14 August 1969, during the IX International Congress of Otorhinolaryngology in Mexico, together with 10 prominent laryngologists, the Collegium MedicorumTheatri (CoMeT). He served for many years as ‘Secretary-Coordinator’, and the CoMeT became an international, still flourishing, organization devoted to the clinical care of singers and actors, and to the research related to the physiology and pathology of the artistic voice.

Eighteen medical and scientific associations elected Dr. Hans von Leden an honorary member, accompanied by 36 national and international awards for contributions to medicine and science, decorations and orders from numerous countries.

The voice community is deeply impressed by Hans von Leden’s outstanding contributions which serve as a foundation for phonosurgery.