The estimated cost of the ingredients, for 1 oz., is one halfpenny.
OHRSORB COMPOUND.
The following advertisement is taken from Cassell’s Saturday Journal:
DOCTOR MAKES DEAF HEAR.
A medical book just published describes a German doctor’s wonderfully simple cure for deafness and head noises (a real home cure). A limited number of those books have been secured for readers of Cassell’s Saturday Journal, and will be sent free by post by the publisher, M. Franckel.
Application to the London address given brought a pamphlet of sixteen pages, from which a few extracts are here given:
For years it has been known to Medical Men that the minute vessels or channels of the lymphatic system underlying the skin, covering the bone behind the ear, were intimately connected with those supplying vital nourishment to the middle and internal ear, where we find the common seat of deafness and head noises. If, then, we could medicate through the skin, this important current of lymphatic fluid, controlling the health of the essential parts of the organ of hearing, our medications could be made to flow inward to reach and to cure a disease so deeply hidden within the ear as to be otherwise regarded as incurable. It is the province of this little work to explain why the prescriptions of so many aurists have failed in years past, and to present a new chemical compound which is of the utmost value to deaf people.
Applications behind the ear are recommended in the writings of our greatest ear surgeons. Gruber, Politzer, Delstanche, Grünfeld, and numerous others have given us prescriptions of this kind, and, although their combinations of drugs have failed to produce any remarkable results, they have pointed out the remedies that would cure if combined with a substance which could penetrate the skin freely.... Until lately we possessed no basis for our ointments, embrocations, or plasters, which could freely penetrate the skin.... Happily there is a new basis lately brought to the notice of the medical profession, which has the remarkable property of uniting with the watery secretions of the body in such a way that it (sic) absorbed by the skin, and taken up by the lymphatic circulation (described on p. 1), together with any drugs that are combined with it in the form of an ointment.... To this new basis has been given the name “Ohrsorb.”
Quotations purporting to be from the writings of medical men are given, but no references are provided by which they can be checked; and, indeed, the extracts only refer to a “new preparation” and a “new treatment,” without any indication that the advertised article is the one intended. Another quotation is then given “From the Private Clinical Memoranda of Dr. Kupfinn,” described as an “Hon. Auris Chirurgis,” in which “Ohrsorb” is referred to in a laudatory manner; this is followed by an account of some “typical cases,” but it does not appear that this is part of the quotation, although it is so put that it might easily be taken to be. The pamphlet continues:
It should be clearly understood that Ohrsorb by itself is only a basis used solely for the purpose of providing the active portion of the Author’s Absorption Treatment, and that the cure depends on the medicinal action of the drugs compounded with it in any special prescription. It is for this reason that certain particulars as to each patient’s case are asked for on the enclosed coupon, namely, that the individual form of deafness, head noises, or ear trouble may be treated by an “Ohrsorb” compound specially adapted to it.