The general practitioner and deaf mutism / by Duncan Matheson Mackay.

  • Mackay, Duncan Matheson.
Date:
1908
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The general practitioner and deaf mutism / by Duncan Matheson Mackay. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

    5/18
    \ -j . cj v -VOOT o: , / v / 13 R n3- ' THE GENERAL PRACTITIONER AND DEAF MUTISM.1 By DUNCAN MATHESON MACKAY, M.D., Honorary Aurist to the Hull, East Yorkshire, and Lincolnshire Institution for the Deaf and Dumb; Late Senior Clinical Assistant to the Hospital for Diseases of the Throat, Golden Square, London, W., etc. I have ventured to couple the general practitioner with deaf mutism, because, after all, the problem of deaf mutism is really a problem for the practitioner of general medicine rather than for the practitioner of aural surgery. The victim of deaf mutism may, in the end, come to one who professes a specialty, but it is usually at a time when no help, of the kind he seeks, can be given him. Standing, as he does, between two, the general practitioner and the educationalist, the aurist has too often to confess that he is helpless. Who- ever saw the patient earlier might perhaps have done some- thing, now there is no man to help but the schoolmaster. For, sorrowfully, one must admit, deaf mutism is most frequentty incurable. There is only one method, by which it can be treated with any reasonable hope of success, and that is,—as an Irishman might say,—by treating it before it is there to treat. Which saying is but another way of asserting that, while deaf mutism is, as a rule, incurable, it is, not seldom, preventable. And of all the practitioners of medicine and surgery, the general practitioner is the one who can do most to prevent it. It is his advice that the public acts upon, when it acts upon expert advice at all in things pertaining to health, and it is his aid that the afflicted public seeks first, when it awakens to a sense of its aural disabilities. Such being the position of affairs, I am taking it upon me to put together a brief statement of the present views as to the causation of deaf mutism, and a summary of the more important findings in its morbid anatomy and pathology. In doing this, I shall draw largely upon the collected evidence 1 A Paper read before the Hull Medical Society. P 10453.—2. A 2