Contributions to aural surgery / [W.R. Wilde].

  • William Wilde
Date:
1844-1848
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Contributions to aural surgery / [W.R. Wilde]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    grained bears of children, the very plague of doctors), about seven years of age, and asked me if I could cure him of a very bad deafness, with which he had been affected for the last five years. After much coaxing and some frightening, I was per¬ mitted to look into the ears; both were filled with profuse muco¬ purulent discharge, ropy, foetid, and crusting on the external parts; an erysipelatous blush was around the thickened, scaly, orifice, and having succeeded in cleansing the meatus, I could perceive a polypus excrescence filling up both tubes. Hearing was much improved by the removal (for the first time for many months) of the discharge. Having explained the nature of the complaint, and that no progress tow ards the restoration of hear¬ ing could take place till the polypi or other excrescences that might be present were removed, and the discharge healed, the ladv at once informed me, that unless I could restore her son’s hearing without drying up the discharge she would have nothing to say to me, for that some of her children having died of water on the brain, she was told by her family physician never to let this “ running from the ears” be stopped, or that if she did he would instantly be similarly affected. I do not mention this as a solitary instance, but as a type of cases that I meet with almost daily, and chiefly among the middle classes of society; the poor are unacquainted with such medical refinements. One patient is afraid of apoplexy, epilepsy, or paralysis; the mother of another fears convulsions, hydrocephalus, or sore eyes; and a third cannot be persuaded that it is not connected with his brain. During the last summer an English lady desired my advice for otorrhoea, more on account of its unpleasantness than for any other reason ; the history she gave of it was, that when quite a girl, at school, she was attacked with pain in one ear, attended by a discharge, and that the latter had continued ever since, sometimes more, sometimes less, the hearing always variable but yearly becoming worse, till now, that ear had become of little use in general society. Almost immediately upon the appear¬ ance of the discharge, and several times subsequently, she had
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