Hearing Happiness by Jaipreet Virdi

Author:Jaipreet Virdi [Virdi, Jaipreet]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO000000 Biography & Autobiography / General
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2020-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

Finger Surgery

During the summer of 1923, the New York Times and Time magazine reported that King Alfonso of Spain had summoned a famous New York osteopath to treat his fifteen-year-old son, Infante Don Jaime. Deaf and mute following a severe case of mastoiditis (a form of middle-ear infection) and possibly tuberculosis, Don Jaime was judged “incurable” by Spanish specialists who had attempted to restore the young prince’s hearing. One surgeon unsuccessfully performed a difficult surgery in 1912 that only worsened the prince’s condition. According to the sensationalist newspaper World, in 1920 a London-based bonesetter named Dr. May was summoned by the desperate king to perform an innovative surgery. The story, however, proved to be pure fabrication. Another report testified that an unnamed physician recommended the child to be sent to a sanitarium in Switzerland for a full course of the “rest cure.” Despite all these failed treatments, Don Jaime was tutored and cared for most of his life by Valencian nurses whose primary mission was devoted to educating the deaf and mute.51

Brooklyn-based Dr. Curtis H. Muncie happened to be sailing on the Majestic, bound for Europe that summer. Reporters deduced that Muncie was the American osteopath summoned by King Alfonso, likely to perform his famous bloodless and painless “constructive bi-digital intra-aural” technique, otherwise known as the “Muncie Reconstructive Method,” or simply “finger surgery.”52 This was a highly specialized procedure of Muncie’s own creation that required him to insert his delicate fingers through a patient’s larynx to manipulate the Eustachian tube and manually correct aural defects causing deafness. Allegedly, this cure had a 90 percent success rate in otherwise incurable cases.

As reports of Don Jaime’s miraculous surgery made headlines, King Alfonso’s court sent a cablegram to the Spanish ambassador in Washington, D.C., demanding a correction of the erroneous reports.53 No physician, Muncie or otherwise, had cured the prince’s deafness. Facing accusations of charlatanry and fraud on his return to the United States, Muncie sent out a press release insisting that the stories connecting him to the prince were false and an “unfair and malicious attack” on him and his method, likely planted by enemies of osteopathy who were threatened by his financial success.54 He clarified that he had sailed to Europe to treat a prince, but had not named the prince in his original publicity statements, being bound by patient confidentiality. He had never once said—nor ordered anyone to say on his behalf—that he treated the Spanish prince.

Despite criticism, the Don Jaime fiasco put Muncie in the international spotlight. Newspapers and magazines described his finger surgery, proclaiming it as the latest modern cure for deafness. From 1910 to 1960, he was reputed to manage the world’s largest otology-osteopathy practice, which occupied the entire twenty-ninth floor of the fashionably exclusive Hotel Delmonico facing Central Park in Manhattan. At his practice, a grand reception room greeted prospective patients: a plush velour couch, high-grade Persian rugs, gilded-framed artwork on papered walls, and a table decorated with fresh flowers and copies of the American Journal of Osteopathy.

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