Operation for Deafness

A young man lay drowsing on the operating table, numbed by morphine and a local anesthetic. Dimly, without pain, he felt the surgeon's electric drill cut through the bony tissue of his deafened ear. Then "a little pinch," and suddenly a great roar, like the waves of the sea. It was the muttered conversation of doctor and nurses, the first sounds the young man had heard in 16 years. For two weeks he lay in the hospital, gradually accustoming himself to the thunder of swinging doors, the drums and tramplings of tiptoeing nurses.

Last week, steady and alert, the young man marched into a scientific meeting at the New York Academy of Medicine with some 50 patients of 48-year-old Otolaryngologist Julius Lempert. All had been cured of apparently hopeless deafness by an operation of hairbreadth delicacy, developed in Europe 15 years ago. Its name: "endaural fenestration."

The human ear consists of three labyrinths: the outer, middle and inner ear. The outer ear collects sound waves, passes them through a long canal to the eardrum. The soundwaves striking the drum set up vibrations which are transmitted first through the tiny lever bones of the middle ear--the "hammer," "anvil," and "stirrup"--then through a tissue-thin window into the inner ear. On the other side of this window is the main sound-wave receiver, a snail-like bone sunk deep in the base of the skull, with communicating nerves to the brain.

Main cause of the deep middle-ear deafness which afflicts 5,000,000 people in the U. S. is otosclerosis, a bony overgrowth blocking off the window which leads to the inner ear. Most operations designed to open a window may be dangerous, for they involve partial destruction of the heavy mastoid bone. Dr. Lempert cuts directly through the ear (see cut), and carves out a brand-new window. With a dentist's burr, he drills into the middle ear, drills out a new window in one of the semicircular canals and rearranges hammer, anvil and stirrup.

Since 1937, Dr. Lempert has opened the ears of 150 deafened patients. Of these, 93 can now hear perfectly, eleven "show marked improvement," 32 are "unimproved," and 14 are worse. Throughout the U. S., endaural fenestration has been tried by a score of surgeons. On the whole, their results have been discouraging. Conservative otolaryngologists regard the operation with a skeptical eye, attribute Dr. Lempert's high percentage of cures to his extraordinary skill.

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