Whatever happened to the EENT specialists?

As specialization in surgery grew in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, practices that combined ophthalmology with otolaryngology were common in the United States. When the knowledge base and technical skills for each of these fields grew and diverged, these practices became rarer. Their end was signaled by the formal separation in 1979 of the American Academy of Ophthalmology and Otolaryngology into two separate associations.