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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    this digression merely for the purpose of fixing the date of an interesting inquiry in aural pathology. The first book that treated of our subject in the seventeenth century was a posthumous Latin work of Jos Heurnius, on the dis¬ eases of the organs of hearing, published by his son, the cele¬ brated Otho Heurnius, in 1602. Lincke, however, says that he was but a compiler. Heretofore the treatment of aural diseases consisted, for the most part, in medical agents and empirical nostrums ; but at the beginning of that century (that is in 1646), the principles of sur¬ gery were brought to bear upon this class of affections by the master hand of Fabricius von Hilden. His observations on the extraction of foreign bodies, on polypus, and other affections of the external auditory conduit, are well worthy of perusal; and to him is generally ascribed the invention of the first speculum auris, as well as the first ear instruments on record. This spe¬ culum was formed on the principle of the common forceps-like instrument now in general use. This is the instrument, or one similarly constructed, which tradition has handed down to the present day, as having been used by Fabricius; but from the following passage in a still older writer, Peter de la Cerlata, “per inspectionem ad solem trahendo aurern et ampliando cum speculo aut alio instrumentof I am led to believe that means were employed before his time for examining the external auditory passages. Instruments of this kind, and for this purpose, having been once recognized and employed by practitioners, have since been variously modified, according to the ingenuity of the inventor;—yet their first in¬ troduction into practice decidedly formed an epoch in aural sur¬ gery. Fabricius’s observations, and the description of his instru¬ ments, will be found in his “ Opera Omnia ’ published in 1646. After the days of this great surgeon, the next work of any merit that appeared in connexion with aural medicine, was pub¬ lished by a Genevese anatomist, Theophilus Bonet; his obser¬ vations, as they are set forth in his great work, the “ Sepulcre-
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