Far more common than insects are inanimate objects as foreign
bodies in the ear, and numerous examples are to be found in
literature. Fabricius Hildanus tells of a glass ball introduced
into the auditory canal of a girl of ten, followed by headache,
numbness on the left side, and after four or five years epileptic
seizures, and atrophy of the arm. He extracted it and the
symptoms immediately ceased. Sabatier speaks of an abscess of the
brain caused by a ball of paper in the ear; and it is quite
common for persons in the habit of using a tampon of cotton in
the meatus to mistake the deep entrance of this substance for
functional derangement, and many cases of temporary deafness are
simply due to forgetfulness of the cause. A strange case is
reported in a girl of fourteen, who lost her tympanum from a
profuse otorrhea, and who substituted an artificial tympanum
which was, in its turn, lost by deep penetration, causing
augmentation of the symptoms, of the cause of which the patient
herself seemed unaware. Sometimes artificial otoliths are
produced by the insufflation of various powders which become
agglutinated, and are veritable foreign bodies. Holman tells of a
negro, aged thirty-five.
Pages:
1058
1059
1060
1061
1062
1063
1064
1065
1066
1067
1068
1069
1070
1071
1072
1073
1074
1075
1076
1077
1078
1079
1080
1081
1082