I was in New York last week, walking along a street in Soho, when this picture on a salon door caught my eye.
No, this is not a picture of a crime scene. It’s a hollow candle, and they light the end that isn’t in your ear, and the idea is that the heat from the candle creates a suction that draws the wax out of your ear. It’s also, somehow, supposed to help with your sinus infection and general hearing.
Doctors hate this thing, because all kinds of injuries can happen during “candling,” including a ruptured eardrum. Here’s the Mayo Clinic’s warning,and the FDA’s.
Tympanic membrane perforation is pretty common—it’s nasty to think about a ruptured eardrum, but the membrane separating your outer ear from your inner ear is pretty thin, and not that hard to rupture. It happens to little kids with bad ear infections, or to soldiers too close to a blast (acoustic trauma), or to people in an airplane who experience a sudden drop in pressure. Usually the ear heals on its own.
This ear candle gizmo reminds me of the way Claudius murdered Hamlet’s father–by pouring poison into “the porches of” his ear.
Sleeping within mine orchard, My custom always in the afternoon, Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole, With juice of cursed hebona in a vial, And in the porches of mine ears did pour The leperous distilment; whose effect Holds such as enmity with blood of man That swift as quicksilver it courses through The natural gates and alleys of the body, And with a sudden vigour it doth posset And curd, like eager droppings into milk, The thin and wholesome blood: so did it mine: And a most instant tetter bark’d about, Most lazar-like, with vile and loathsome crust, All my smooth body.
How did Shakespeare dream this stuff up, I have often wondered (well I mean, besides the fact that he’s Shakespeare and all)? It would have taken a pretty sophisticated understanding of how the ear is connected to the throat to realize henbane in the ear is a plausible way to off someone.
Turns out, there’s a pile of newspaper and scholarly articles about this very subject.
Pouring a quick-acting poison into someone’s ear is an ingenious and difficult-to-trace crime. The Elizabethans had just discovered the presence of Eustachian tubes, which connect the ear and the throat, thanks to Bartolommeo Eustachio. Hamlet’s father could have been suffering from a tympanic membrane perforation, or, Claudius could easily have punctured it with the funnel he put into his brother’s ear, giving the poison a rapid route to the throat.
Shakespeare would also have been aware of the accusations leveled at the famous French surgeon, Ambroise Paré (one of my heroes), who was accused of poisoning the French king, Francois II by giving him an ear infection.