Medical epidemics : glaucoma and iridectomy : a review.

Date:
1860
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Medical epidemics : glaucoma and iridectomy : a review. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    performed on 107 eyes, from May, 1857, to September, 1859, inclusive. Of these, eighty cases were benefited by the opera- tion, a fact which speaks volumes in its favour. How the figures in the foregoing statement are made out, we are at a loss to divine; and, with respect to the benefit achieved, it is really diflicult for a reviewer to answer a worthy man and a respectable practitioner without being uncourteous. It would seem, however, that the Report published by Dr. Bader was first written, and the table which should have been the basis thereof was compiled afterwards; certainly the incon- gruities between the two can only be explained in this manner. The first portion of Dr. Bader's Report appeared in No. 9, published in October last, and the conclusion containing the table which we have analyzed, and which bears no date, came out, we believe, in the end of April. In that first portion, an analysis is given of some seventy-eight cases, but they do not seem to form any part of, nor can they under any single head- ing, or by any stretch of statistical ingenuity, be made to agree with the table published as a continuation and conclusion of the same paper in No. 10. The jumble has been so complete that it should have been referred to the Statistical Congress. Cer- tainly we can make nothing of it. But, though we cannot offer any explanation of the figures, we can supply our readers with a few trifling incidents related in the letter-press descrip- tion of the reporter from the London Ophthalmic Hospital. In chronic glaucoma, when blind for some time, it is not ex- pected to regain sight; [and] a chronic glaucomatous eye with mere perception of light is rarely improved by the operation; but generally the pain and the progress towards blindness is (sic) arrested; so that, although sight cannot be regained, to pre- vent mere perception of light being lost, a severe and, to the eye frequently fatal, operation is recommended. Hemorrhage, it seems, was not an unfrequent occurrence, and must have in- creased the intra-ocular pressure not a little—possibly upon the homeopathic principle of similia similibus curantur. We are not, it is true, told how many cases of hemorrhage occurred; but as such eyes may, we believe, be found in certain museums, where they are the pride of the curators, although possibly regret- ted by their original owners, and a source of unquiet recollec- tion to the operators, they have advanced pathological anatomy; yet some may consider them a disgrace to operative surgery. In several of these cases of hemorrhage, writes Dr. Bader, in which the eye had been removed after the escape of the vitreous, it was found that the blood was extravasated from the large vessels of the choroid, had displaced the choroid and
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