Penner9 and Jaffe10 have postulated that hypercoagulation, embolic, and thrombotic problems may precipitate sudden deafness by affecting the microcirculation of the inner ear. These syndromes have been found to occur in decompression sickness11 and deafness and vestibular attacks are known to occur with diving.4 In our laboratory, we were able to demonstrate severe cochlear potential losses in guinea pigs with the induction of decompression sickness. The problem was largely prevented by the prophylactic administration of heparin. Preliminary study of the temporal bones of a guinea pig with a severe post‐dive vestibular attack and loss of cochlear potential function showed the presence of hemorrhage in the perilymph of the auditory and vestibular system. The above results are interpreted as evidence that hypercoagulation, embolic and thrombotic problems may precipitate a loss of cochlear dysfunction — most likely in a diving situation and potentially in cases of sudden deafness not related to diving.

It comes as something of a shock to those who return to Cooper in maturity to find that eleven of his thirty-two works of fiction are full-fledged novels of the sea, books in which the characters are not hunters, squatters, Indians and soldiers, but merchant seamen, sealers, man-of-war's men, packet masters and pirates. Their settings are not frontier settlements like Templeton or wilderness outposts like Fort William Henry, not the forest or the prairie, but Narragansett Bay, New York Harbor, the English Channel and the Straits of Sunda. They are informed not by the lore of the hunt and the warpath but by the technology of seamanship and the principles of naval tactics. The areas of nautical experience with which they deal are so diverse that together they comprise a virtual microcosm of the great world of maritime activity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Cooper's accounts of colonial smuggling, Caribbean piracy, the China trade, the Antarctic seal fishery and the transatlantic packet service supply a vivid informal history of American nautical enterprise. He extends his range to European maritime experience in two of these novels: The Wing-and-Wing tells the story of a French privateer in the Mediterranean during the Napoleonic wars, while The Two Admirals carries its readers back to the mid-eighteenth century and the complex fleet actions of the Royal Navy.

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