On the cure of cataract, with a practical summary of the best modes of operating, (Contintental and British).

  • Neill, Hugh
Date:
1848
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the cure of cataract, with a practical summary of the best modes of operating, (Contintental and British). Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    and nervous results, which are apt to assume a severer form than in the case of the elderly or the very young. [a] Do short- After an operation, the sight as may be supposed, is pieseebetter, rarely as good as that of an eye which is sound. Yet it is -and the J ° J lonf-sighted remarkable that people who are short-sighted often see not so well— L L ° ration™ or,e far better after the operation than they did before it, and that those who are long-sighted much less so, and are obliged to have recourse to spectacles, with glasses of biconvex power. [b] [a] If the remarks in the text are to be taken as embodying the observations of Stozber, then they are at variance, I must say, with the tenor of my experience in hospital and private practice. It is quite true that the old and the young are less prone to violent inflammations than those in the robust prime of life. But then in middle life we have acute but healthy inflammation, which will yield when combated by the means medically and surgically in the operator's hands. Whereas, with the old we have often shattered constitutions, tainted by the arti- ficial modes of life; and in the young those morbid hereditary conditions which refuse to submit to a rule of anti-phlogistic treat- ment—so that each period of life may fairly be put upon a par. And if the disease be bli?idness arising from Cataract alone, the sufferer — be he young, middle aged, or an ancient, may still fairly hope for an equal amount of benefit by operative surgery. — H. N. I have an old person who sub- mitted to the operation for the removal of congenital Cataract, when he was sixty years old. The central opacity had made him always have imperfect sight; and his convex eye made the matter worsebymaking him near-sighted. My old friend, now that he has free admission of light, requires no spectacles for ordinary purposes— and he walks erect. In his old age he is truly Anthropos.— H. N. [b] Dr. Carson, F. R. S., upon whom I successfully operated, (when upwards of 70,) had his eyes made equal to a telescope. He could see from Seacombe the face of the parish clock, and tell the hour across the Mersey, more than a mile distant.—H. N.