EARLY DIAGNOSES OF MASTOID DISEASE AND OPERATION, AS A LIFE SAVING MEASURE, IN THE PREVENTION OF PYÆMIC AND MENINGITIC COMPLICATIONS.Read in the Section of Laryngology and Otology, at the Forty-third Annual Meeting of the American Medical Association, held at Detroit, Mich., June, 1892.

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Acute suppuration of the middle ear is a disease of very common occurrence, and runs its course in many instances without serious complications, ending in recovery. Other cases result in permanent destruction of a part, or the whole of the drum membrane; while some result in deafness, chronic suppuration, granulations, polypi, etc.

More serious complications frequently occur, such as suppuration in the mastoid cells, with perforation and pyæmia, cerebral abscess, or meningitis from caries and extention of inflammation.

Such complications occur more frequently,I believe, than has generally been supposed by the medical profession, and I think those who have given any considerable time to the study and treatment of aural disease will bear me out in the assertion.

The general practitioner is not awake to the dangers of this disease, and with a hypodermic of morphia they put the patient to sleep—and the doctor as well—while the true character of