Myringotomy cleaning it with an ear spoon. Surprisingly, the patient's hearing improved. There are also reports from the 17th and 18th centuries describing separate experiments exploring the function of the ear drum. In particular, the animal experiments of Thomas Willis were expanded upon by Sir Astley Cooper, who presented two papers to the Royal Society in 1801 on his observations that myringotomy could improve hearing. First, he showed that two patients with perforations of both eardrums could hear perfectly well, despite conventional wisdom that this would result in deafness. Second, he demonstrated that deafness caused by obstruction of the Eustachian tube
Traditional Chinese medicines derived from the human body "Three Corpses; demonic spirits believed to live in the human body and hasten death" and "gǔdú" 蠱毒 "gu poisoning"; a poison produced by venomous insects; cast a black magic spirit possession over someone". The first "Bencao gangmu" prescription for human nails is not from Chinese medical texts but from Daoist rituals for expelling what (Cooper & Sivin (1973: 220) describe as the "Three Corpse-Worms 三尸, the chief of the "inner gods" who are to the individual microcosm what the celestial bureaucracy is to the cosmos." Prescription 52.6.1, the 斬三尸法 "Method of Beheading the Three Corpses", involves supernaturally cutting the nails