Medicine: Noisy Heads

• Share

At Temple University some months ago 500 curious but sympathetic medical students and teachers listened to the roaring, buzzing sounds manufactured inside of George Yocum's head. A coal miner, George Yocum had been caught in a rock slide in 1935, suffered an injury to the carotid artery behind his right eye. The artery's weakened wall allowed it to swell out in a sac which was full of pulsing blood. In front, the sac caused the eye to protrude; in back, it throbbed against the skull, wore down the bone. The throbbing produced the noises in his head. At the university, the noises were picked up by a microphone, electrically amplified so that they resounded through a spacious auditorium. Surgical repair of the damaged artery was deemed necessary to relieve Miner Slocum of his trouble.

A much simpler cure was suggested last week for a much noisier head noise under observation at Hines Hospital, run by the U. S. Veterans Administration in Proviso Township, near Chicago. Charles Hester had complained of a ticking in his head, and doctors could actually hear the ticking by cupping their ears a few inches away. It had bothered him intermittently ever since a shell exploded near him in the War. Colonel Hugh Scott, chief of the hospital staff, diagnosed as follows: "The tick-tock is caused when he moves a certain muscle in his palate. The movement of the palatal muscle carries the sound through the Eustachian tube to the middle ear.'' The muscular agitation in the roof of Veteran Hester's mouth appeared to be semivoluntary or hysterical in character, somewhat like hysterical paralysis which immobilizes an arm or leg although there is nothing organically wrong. There was some evidence that Veteran Hester could start or stop the muscular ticking at will. He was therefore advised that if he made up his mind to stop and was confident he could stop, he would stop.