Remembering Brown-Rho scaling
The properties of hadrons in dense matter have been a core interest of mine since I entered graduate school at Stony Brook in 1984. This interest was shaped both by the strong research activity on the subject at Stony Brook at the time and by the influence of Mannque Rho, who was a frequent visitor there. In this memoir dedicated to Mannque, I describe a selection of his works that sparked my interest in the subject and present my current perspective on what Mannque, together with Gerry Brown, sought to emphasize in the often-misinterpreted Brown--Rho scaling. In light of recent developments, I also discuss refinements of Brown--Rho scaling for mesons and baryons, associated with spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking and $U_A(1)$-breaking effects.