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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    semen, which was generated in the brain, could no longer pass down to the genitals. Johann Baptista van Helmont, evidently a Belgian, casts away the theory that had so long prevailed, of deafness being caused by ascending exhalations, and clears up the whole matter by ascribing it to the work of the devil, or other evil spirits. 1640] Marcus Banze gives us the first idea of an artificial membrana tympani, by proposing to place a tube of ivory in the auditory canal, the end of which is covered by a bit of pig's bladder, as a protection to the exposed ear, when the membrana tympani was lost by ulceration. 1646] The renowned surgeon, Fabricius of Hilden, or Fabri- cius Hildanus, so called to distinguish him from Fabri- cius of Acqvapendente, contributed somewhat to the surgery of the ear. He invented an instrument for extracting foreign bodies from the ear, as, indeed, every surgeon of eminence seems to have thought it his duty to do. He also wrote of the removal of aural polypi. In the latter half of the seventeenth century, Thomas Willis attempted to prove, by experiments on animals, that total deafness does not ensue when the membrana tympani is destroyed. He also made some interesting observations on deaf persons who only heard in the midst of a noise. Yon Troltsch quotes one of these cases in his text-book,* that of a woman who could only hear her husband when a servant was beating a drum. The conversations in that family were probably not very protracted. This kind of impairment of hearing, which was called paracusis Willisiana, was referred by its describer to a relaxation of the membrana tympani, the normal tension being restored by the noise, or vibrations of the atmos- phere. 1683] Du Verney, known by his labors in the anatomy of the organ, and his work on the diseases of the ear, contributed very little to sound knowledge, although he made an attempt to arrange the diseases in accordance with the anatomy. He, however, disputed the generally accepted opinion that a dis-