IN RECENT YEARS there has been a growing interest in the problem of early diagnosis of deafness in newborns, on account of the necessity of early rehabilitation.
One of the methods of hearing examinations among newborns is observation of changes of heartbeats caused by tonal stimulation. The first papers on this subject were based on the examination of human fetuses.
Sontag and Wallace in 1934 and Sontag and Richards in 1938, according to Bernard and Sontag,1 recorded fetal movements and acceleration of the pulse after applying a tone of 120 cps.
In 1947 Bernard and Sontag1 published interesting observations on heart reaction of five human fetuses. The authors registered the heart action after acoustic stimulation delivered by audiometer in the region of the child's head, noting acceleration of the heart action after applying tones.
At "The Second Conference of Children's Otolaryngology" in Warsaw, Dwornicka et al2,3 presented results