WHEN VERTIGO, associated with Ménière's syndrome, becomes intractable and incapacitating, the patient becomes a candidate for surgery. This is not a pleasant outlook for the patient, nor for the treating physician. As a consequence, there has been an incessant but yet unrewarding search for a satisfactory medical treatment. Williams1recently reported: Neither the definition, the diagnosis nor the dysfunction of Ménière's disease is much clearer now than when Ménière first described the condition in 1861.... On the basis of recently acquired information, we may define Ménière's disease as a disorder of a predisposed stria vascularis, possibly in response to a hypothalamic stimulus, with the local synthesis of toxic amounts of histamine and possibly of norepinephrine, producing in the stria vascularis the picture of the slow stage of shock, increased hydrodynamic pressure in the endolymphatic system, loss of hearing, and, secondarily, attacks of vertigo, nausea and vomiting. In a later