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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    lost liis hearing at eight years of age; but he became able to read the Bible aloud, and to converse with some fluency. Lincke begins his account of the progress of otology in the eighteenth century with the lament that it did not keep pace with the anatomical investigations of the organ, which had been brought to such a high point by the labors of Valsalva, Cassebohm, Cotugno, and Scarpa, and he says that Otology would have advanced very much faster had Antoine Marie Valsalva devoted himself more to its prosecution. But Valsalva did much to give us correct notions in regard to the diseases of the ear. He adduced cases where the membrana tympani had been restored. He showed that the hearing power is merely impaired, not lost, by a perforation of the membrana tympani. He recognized anchylosis of the base of the stapes as a. cause of deafness. He gave us the Valsalvian experi- ment, the mode of forcing air through the Eustachian tube by a forced expiration with the mouth and nostrils closed, and he advises it as the best means of cleansing the middle ear from pus. He proved that the cavity of the tympanum is connected to the cells of the mastoid process, by a case in which he injected the former through a fistulous opening in the latter.* He also showed that stoppage of the Eustachian tube is often a cause of deafness. This is certainly a re- freshing catalogue after we have been wading through the disgusting empiricism of the centuries before. Valsalva's century is, however, also cursed with theoretic treatises on aural disease, such as that of one Frederick Hoffmann, who goes on, in the good old way, with instillations of wonderfully compounded ear-drops. Lincke mentions numerous inaugural dissertations of this time, but they relate chiefly to cases that were not properly understood by the re- porters of them ; and these authors, as well as their theses, are deservedly forgotten. 1774] J. L. Petit in a work upon surgical diseases, reports many interesting cases of caries of the temporal bone. In one case of suppuration in the ear, with caries of the mas- toid, he advised that this part should be cut down upon and * As I have elsewhere shown, this case was for a long time supposed to be one of perforation of the mastoid. Vide chapter on the disease of the mastoid.