Selected monographs.

Date:: 1861

Credit: Selected monographs. Source: Wellcome Collection.

353/368 page 319

$and could only indistinctly recognise even large objects. He com- plained of scintillation and pain in the eye and forehead. I made him keep his bed, placed an ice-bag on the eye, had him bled to twelve ounces, and ordered him sahne draughts. After the ice had been used continuously, day and night, for a fortnight, the man M as nearly well, and at the end of the third week left the hospital com- pletely cured. The extravasated blood had been entirely absorbed, the hypersemia had disappeared, and the power of sight was com- pletely recovered. But even in those cases in which the injury has affected the internal tunics of the eye, and in Avliich it has been so extensive that the whole organ must become destroyed by it, by using ice the process of atrophy takes place with very little pain and with scarcely any disturbance of the general health of the, patient, which is, I believe, never the case when the affection has been treated by cataplasms. The following case may serve as an instance. Case 16.—Destruction of the eye by small shot ; application, of ice for four weeh.—I\ S—, a strong man, set. 28, received, on the 28th October, 1855, a charge of small shot in the left side of his face from a distance of three yards. The shot struck the left cheek, in a line extending from the tip of the nose to the mastoid process. The patient lost his sight immediately after he had received the shot . The cheek began to swell rapidly, and the numerous wounds bled freely. When he came to the hospital, two hours after the accident, the whole left side of the face was enormously swollen, especially the eyelids, the cheek, and the left side of the nose, the tip of which seemed to be pushed towards the right side. Many small opening with blackened margins, were visible on the swollen surface. They were most densely strown just below the left eye, in an area of about: an inch in diameter. Some of the wounds were examined with a probe, for the purpose of finding out what direction the shot had uiken. We came to the conclusion that some of the shot, which had entered in the neighbourhood of the nose, had gone into the 11 pper jaw, whilst those which had entered the cheek had travelled for a distance through the soft parts, and passed out again in the neighbourhood of the parotis, Some of the shot had struck ihr ear, None bad entered above the eve, but the eve was laeeraled, and$

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