Prosper Meniere and his disease

In 1861, Prosper Meniere presented a paper before the French Academy of Med icine in which he described a series of patients with episodic vertigo and hearing loss. He also mentioned the postmortem examination of a young girl who experienced vertigo after a hemorrhage into the inner ear. Prior to tha t time, vertigo was thought to be a cerebral symptom similar to epileptic s eizures. Meniere pointed out that vertigo frequently had a benign course an d that common treatments, such as bleeding, often did more harm than good. He was not attempting to define a disease or syndrome but rather to emphasi ze that vertigo could originate from damage to the inner ear. Confusion reg arding the clinical and pathologic features of Meniere disease persisted we ll into the 20th century.