In sport an attendant tickled his ear with a wooden article used as a pipe light.

A quick, unconscious movement forced the wooden point through the tympanum, causing cerebral inflammation and subsequent death.

There is a record of death, in a child of nine, caused by the passage of a knitting-needle into the auditory meatus.
Kauffmann reports a case of what he calls objective tinnitus aurium, in which the noise originating in the patient's ears was distinctly audible by others.

The patient was a boy of fourteen, who had fallen on the back of his head and had remained unconscious for nearly two weeks.
The noises were bilateral, but more distinct on the left than on the right side.

The sounds were described as crackling, and seemed to depend on movements of the arch of the palate.