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IT is generally agreed that within the last fifteen years some extension has been achieved of our understanding of the problems of human vertigo. Nevertheless, difficulties and confusion still persist and in the course of the present communication an attempt will be made to advance the process of its clarification, both by critical review and by a short account of some of our recent investigations. The foundations of the subject are to be found in the writings of Prosper Meniere, and these we take as our starting point. Meniere's papers on vertigo are chiefly remarkable for the powers which their writer displays of describing and analysing the symptoms and signs of disease. It is easy now to realize that it was this mastery of symptomatology which, more than anything else, enabled him to identify, with an accuracy which has never been seriously questioned, the disease of the labyrinth which has since come to bear his name. Beyond, however, asserting with confidence that the disease was due to a lesion of the internal ear, limited to that organ and indestructive to life, he made no direct observations upon its pathological anatomy, and further information upon this point was not forthcoming until 1938. Since then the morbid anatomical basis of the disease has been established by means of histological examinations of the temporal bones in a number of clinically characteristic cases. It is fair to say that this opinion is not perhaps a universal one. On the contrary, it is still sometimes said that Meniere did describe the pathological anatomy of Meniere's disease, and reference is made to the case which Meniere cited of the young girl who died after a short illness, due to a chill, in the course of which she suffered from deafness, vertigo and vomiting. Meniere examined the temporal bones and found a reddish exudate in the semicircular canals. But no reader of his text could suppose that Meniere wished it to be inferred from this observation that the cause of this girl's illness was the same as that responsible for the recurrent attacks of vertigo with deafness so characteristic of the other, but essentially benign, disease which he had described so clearly. Indeed, the fatal issue of the case alone rules out this possibility. Our own view is that Meniere's reference to the anatomical changes in these labyrinths had an entirely different significance and one, moreover, which is quite obvious from the context. It is necessary to bear in mind that in 1861, when Meniere published his best-known paper, the very possibility that a lesion of the internal ear could cause such severe symptoms as vertigo and vomiting was still a moot point. Flourens' experimental work on pigeons, in which he demonstrated for the first time that gross disorders of equilibrium could be produced by injury of the semicircular canals, had only been published some thirty years earlier, and its significance as regards the problems of human disease had not yet been appreciated. It was Meniere's great merit that he knew of Flourens' work and understood its meaning. To him, therefore, the significance of the exudate in the semicircular canals of his patient was that in it he recognized the vital link so far missing between Flourens' animal experiments and the problem of human vertigo, a demonstrable lesion of the semicircular canals in a subject who had suffered in life from vertigo. Meniere argued that if such a hemorrhagic lesion, occurring in the course of this girl's fatal illness, could produce vertigo, then other lesions of the inner ear, be their precise nature what you will, could also be the cause of the vertigo in his other group of subjects whose symptoms he had described with such care. There Meniere left the matter. He had identified his disease by his accurate specification of its symptomatology and natural history. As to its pathology he said only this: " La lesion materielle reside dans les canaux semicirculaires"-"the essential lesion is situated in the semicircular canals". Little more knowledge came our way until 1938 when Cairns and Hallpike examined the temporal bones of their two subjects and established the nature of Meniere's lesion [1]. Of this the essential abnormality was a distension without evidence of infection or trauma of the endolymphatic vesicle; a finding, remarkable in itself and since reproduced with remarkable uniformity in a considerable number of further histological studies of the temporal bones carried out by Hallpike and also by a number of others. To summarize this chapter of history it can be said that MWni&re's concept was of a disease sui generis of the internal ear. This he based in the main upon his own studies of symptomatology and supported it by

The Pathology, Symptomatology and Diagnosis of Certain Common Disorders of the Vestibular System