left ear, severing the middle
meningeal artery, death ensuing. In this instance, after digital
compression, ligature of the common carotid was practiced as a last
resort. There is an account of a provision-dealer's agent who fell
asleep at a public house at Tottenham. In sport an attendant tickled
his ear with a wooden article used as a pipe light. A quick,
unconscious movement forced the wooden point through the tympanum,
causing cerebral inflammation and subsequent death. There is a record
of death, in a child of nine, caused by the passage of a
knitting-needle into the auditory meatus.

Kauffmann reports a case of what he calls objective tinnitus aurium, in
which the noise originating in the patient's ears was distinctly
audible by others. The patient was a boy of fourteen, who had fallen on
the back of his head and had remained unconscious for nearly two weeks.
The noises were bilateral, but more distinct on the left than on the
right side. The sounds were described as crackling, and seemed to
depend on movements of the arch of the palate. Kauffmann expresses the
opinion that the noises were due to clonic spasm of the tensor velum
palati, and states that under appropriate treatment the tinnitus
gradually subsided.

The introduction of foreign bodies in the ear is usually accidental,
although in children we often find it as a result of sport or
curiosity. There is an instance on record of a man who was accustomed
to catch flies and put them in his ear, deriving from them a
pleasurable sensation from the tickling which ensued. There have been
cases in which children, and even adults, have held grasshoppers,
crickets, or lady-birds to their ears in order to more attentively
listen to the noise, and while in this position the insects have
escaped and penetrated the auditory canal. Insects often enter the ears
of persons reposing in the fields with the ear to the ground. Fabricius
Hildanus speaks of a cricket penetrating the ear during sleep. Calhoun
mentions an instance of disease of the ear which he found was due to
the presence of several living maggots in the interior of the ear. The
patient had been sleeping in a horse stall in which were found maggots
similar to those extracted from his ear. An analogous instance was seen
in a negro in the Emergency Hospital, Washington, D.C., in the summer
of 1894; and many others are recorded. The insects are frequently
removed only after a prolonged lodgment.

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