On throat deafness : and the pathological connections of the throat, nose, and ear / by James Yearsley.

  • Yearsley, James, 1805-1869.
Date:
1852
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On throat deafness : and the pathological connections of the throat, nose, and ear / by James Yearsley. 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.

    24/98 (page 12)
    or expelled by way of the Eustachian tubes. Not so, however, in the endemic catarrh or influenza. Here the loss of hearing is more complete, and the morbid state of the ear remains long enough, in many cases, to destroy the efficiency of the organ. The different forms of cynanche offer other examples of the spread or transmission of disease from the gut- tural to the aural mucous surface. These disorders rarely, indeed, occur without being followed in their course by ear-ache, and, more or less, inflammation within the ear, sometimes passing away at the decline of the throat disease, but quite as often settling itself in a chronic form within the ear. As the final illustration of the extension of disease from the throat to the ear, by continuity of surface, but certainly not the least important, I may instance that kind of deafness which comes on slowly, scarcely perceptible at first, and perhaps, not measurable in its increase from year to year, still causing a painful loss of hearing, if measured by longer periods, such as five or ten years, which is caused, or at least preceded, by a relaxed and thickened state of the mucous membrane of the throat. The guttural mucous membrane seems to have grown too large for the surface on which it is laid, and thus fits loosely, hanging at the back and sides of the throat in folds, or presenting little islets of membrane protruding from the natural surface. This state of throat may take its origin from acute or chronic inflammation of the part itself, but more frequently there is little, if any, sign of increased action throughout its whole course. It may often be diagnosed, without looking into the throat, by the state of the nostrils, which are commonly tumid and red at their inner edges.