A practical treatise on the diseases of the ear : including the anatomy of the organ / by D.B. St. John Roosa.

  • Roosa, D. B. St. John (Daniel Bennett St. John), 1838-1908.
Date:
1880
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A practical treatise on the diseases of the ear : including the anatomy of the organ / by D.B. St. John Roosa. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    notion that patients always spoke in a low tone when the disease of the ear was seated in the auditory nerve, because the nerve supplying the tongue, a branch of the fifth, was at the same time- affected. In deafness arising from venereal disease, blisters behind the ear, and a mixture of oil of guaia- cum and hydrochloric acid, as a local application, of which the patient drank a little, were highly spoken of. 1510-1590] The great Frenchman, the father of modern surgery, Ambrosius Pare, figures in otological his- tory as the first one to employ a syringe for cleansing the ear. 1597] Caspar Tagliacottzi, of Bologna, who did so much for plastic surgery, did not neglect the ear, but attempted to restore the auricle by taking integument from the adjacent skin. He relates one case of a Benedictine Monk, where he had done this with success.* 1690] Although the aural speculum had been used a hun- dred years before, we find a certain Johann Hartman very unwilling to use it; for he seems to advise the detection of inspissated cerumen by the following simple method. He placed a curved silver tube into the ear, and blew through it. If the patient felt the breath to be cold, the deafness did not proceed from impaction of was. In our day the detail of this method is sometimes simplified without altering the principle; that is to say, a probe is used to see if wax is in the ear. Through all this century, the seventeenth, there are numerous volumes on the treatment of the ear, but they all tread through the barren waste of drops and decoctions, theories, nomenclatures, and rank empiricism. Lusitanus gives an amusing explanation of the practice of cutting off the ears of thieves. He said that such treatment rendered them incapable of propagating their kind, and hence no more thieves could be born of them. He founded this opinion on the statement of Hippocrates that the division of the veins behind the ear rendered a man sterile, because the * The efforts made to instruct and to cure the deaf and dumb, which were first thoroughly incited in this half of the sixteenth century, we leave for a fuller discussion in the chapter on deaf-muteism.