I have had to date possibly fifty cases of deafness of one kind or another, almost all of which have been materially helped.
One patient, a minister afflicted with otosclerosis (this supposed thickening of the membranes of the inner ear) for twenty-five years, could barely hear loud talking.
After working for five minutes upon the joints of the third (ring) finger, and to a lesser degree, upon its two neighbors, it was found that the reverend gentleman could hear a whisper twenty feet away.
As proof of this it was whispered to him “Will you kindly close the window above your head?” He rose immediately from his chair, and “obliged.”
A New York physician had a relative who had been unsuccessfully treated for deafness in one ear (the right) for the past sixteen years, by the most famous aurists in New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Dresden, Vienna, and other centers of medical learning. X-Ray treatment had at one time made this case at least twenty-five per cent worse. With the left ear this patient could hear a loud voice “close up.”
Dr. Reid Kellogg volunteered to “show the Doctor something,” using this case for demonstration purposes.
The Doctor, like Barkis, being willin’, our friend took his trusty aluminum comb from his pocket and exerted pressure for five minutes with the teeth of the comb on the finger tips of the patient’s left hand, (see Fig. [12]). He then used a tongue depressor on the hard palate, and on the floor of the mouth, for six or seven minutes more, and then on the tongue for an additional five.
The Doctor then stood ten feet away from his relative and talked to him in an ordinary tone of voice. The patient distinctly heard, with the left ear, every word spoken.
