Aristotle, Galileo and Sellick: The unsolved dilemma of cricoid pressure

Abstract

For almost one thousand years, the principles and structure of the Universe were studied, reported, understood and believed to be in accordance with Aristotle's theory of the five elements (earth, fire, air, water and ether), with the invisible immobile engine and geocentric depiction of planets, stars and deep space (what he called cosmos, Greek word for order and beauty). There was no idea of gravity andmass, as it was time for limited scientific instruments and a generous imagination hypothesis, philosophy being a substitute for science whenever something could not be explained with the sole (limited) available knowledge. At that time religion and science were in some kind of continuum, with any physical principle or event, including health and sickness, being explained with the first or latter, or sometimes with both. As time passed by, and it took almost nine centuries, a curious and obstinate scientist named Galileo started to raise some doubts. It was 1619, and, thanks to being a forerunner of the scientific approach, the italian scientist was the first to see truth through the mist. His doubts were so big that, at a certain point, despite being sure of his intuition and experiments, not to be considered heretic in the face of such big changes, he had to withdraw and deny everything in front of the Inquisition. In a certain sense, Science had to bow to Religion, the interest of the many in comparisonwith the reason of one. As a curiosity, we had towait until October 31st, 1992 when Galileo's opera omnia was removed by the Vatican from the Index of prohibited books. And we had to wait for Isaac Newton, and his general gravity