A practical treatise on the diseases of the ear : including a sketch of aural anatomy and physiology / by D.B. St. John Roosa.

  • Daniel Bennett St. John Roosa
Date:
1878
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A practical treatise on the diseases of the ear : including a sketch of aural anatomy and physiology / by D.B. St. John Roosa. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    INTRODUCTION CHAP TER I. A SKETCH OF THE PROGRESS OP OTOLOGY. There is perhaps no department of the art and science of medicine in which there has been so much literature, with so little exact, or as we say, scientific knowledge, as that which was formerly known as aural medicine and surgery, but which is better designated by the term Otology. 460-370 B.C.] Hundreds and perhaps thousands of volumes have been written on the anatomy, physiology, and diseases of the ear, from the time of Hippocrates until our own day, and yet until the age of Valsalva, the seventeenth century, the treatment of the affections of the organ of hear- ing was purely empirical, while the knowledge of its anatomy and physiology was often incorrect and fragmentary. Even after the investigations of the famous Italian, investigations which consumed sixteen years of his life, and the subsequent anatomical discoveries of the eighteenth century, it was re- served for our own day and generation to place the science of otology, or the knowledge of the anatomy, physiology, and diseases of the ear, on a level with that of other fields of labor in medicine. A singular apathy in regard to the maladies of one of the most important organs of the body, an inexplicable ignorance as to their results, a most irrational and empirical manner of treatment, have been our heritage from the fathers. Prob- ably to-day, in the closing years of the nineteenth century, there are more practitioners of medicine who view aural med- icine and surgery from the stand-point of the errorists of the