Ears

The names of common drugs which make habitual users permanently hard of hearing was the most immediately useful information presented at the convention of the American Otological Society at Long Beach, L. I. last week. Those drugs are, according to Dr. Hermon Marshall Taylor of Jacksonville, Fla.: quinine, salicylates (aspirin, sodium salicylate), tobacco, alcohol, opium, arsenic (salvarsan), lead, mercury, phosphorus, oil of chenopodium, aniline dyes, insulin.

Of all the nerves in the body, the auditory nerve is most sensitive to drugs, said Dr. Taylor, and a majority of the 10,000,000 people in the U. S. who do not hear clearly may well blame their medicine cabinets and self-indulgences. Some drugs affect the ear itself, said Dr. Taylor; others the hearing centres of the brain. Most harmful is quinine, which has been found in the brains of deaf babies of women who took this drug to stimulate childbirth.

Among other avoidable causes of deafness is high flying, according to Dr. Clarence H. Smith of Manhattan. In such cases dizziness and ringing sounds may accompany the deafness. Such flyers may be "attacked in the air by a paroxysm of disabling vertigo."

One otologist, Dr. Harold Grant Tobey of Boston made a cheerful point: "Deafness is not a common symptom of brain tumor."

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