Meniere's Disease

"All of a sudden, doctor, my ears begin to buzz. The room swirls around me. My eyes jerk and I can't keep them still. I reel, and if I don't catch hold of something I fall to the floor. Sometimes I faint. I break into a cold clammy sweat. I feel nauseated. And, doctor, I can't help vomiting. These attacks have been coming over me more frequently. I used to be able to hear perfectly clearly in spite of the buzzing in my ears. But now I am getting deaf. And, doctor, I'm afraid I'm going mad."

In 1861 Dr. Prosper Meniere decided that such symptoms collectively represented a definite disease of the inner ear caused by infection or degeneration. The French physician could do nothing to cure the disease which, upon his death the following year, his colleagues called Meniere's Disease. Nor could his successors do much until the perfection of brain surgery 20 years ago. Brain surgeons stopped the symptoms simply by cutting the acoustic nerve and disconnecting the diseased ear from the brain. Such an operation, however, resulted unavoidably in total deafness. For this reason most surgeons were reluctant to perform it.

The ear performs two functions. It collects sounds and it keeps track of the body's posture. Sensations of sound and of balance reach the brain along separate but intimately packed fibres of the acoustic nerve, a soft strand the diameter of a slate pencil. In Meniere's Disease only the balancing mechanism of the ear is impaired and all that is essential is to cut only the fibres which conduct balancing sensations. Brain surgeons, like exalted telephone repairmen selecting particular lines in a many-stranded cable, tried with little success--to pick out the balancing fibres of the acoustic nerve.

Last week Dr. Walter Edward Dandy, choleric neurologist who became Johns Hopkins' brain surgeon after Choleric Brain Surgeon Harvey Gushing left that institution for Harvard, announced that he could pick out the proper fibres to cut. This meant that henceforth a victim of Meniere's Disease can walk out of Johns Hopkins Hospital with the greatest of assurance and dignity. He can enjoy hearing the clicking of his heels in the corridors and the voice of the cashier telling him how big his bill is.

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