On granular disease of the conjunctiva and contagious ophthalmia / by Edward Nettleship.

  • Edward Nettleship
Date:
[1874-1875]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On granular disease of the conjunctiva and contagious ophthalmia / by Edward Nettleship. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by UCL Library Services. The original may be consulted at UCL (University College London)

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    On Granular Disease of the Conjunctiva and Contagious Ophthalmia. By Edward Nettleship, F.R.C.S., Surgeon to the South London Ophthalmic Hospital. Late Clinical Assist- ant and Curator of the Museum at Moorfields Ophthalmic Hospital. During the first quarter of the present century the group of diseases now known collectively as contagious ophthalmia received for the first time much attention. It was chiefly in relation to the havoc made by ophthalmia in the English and Erench armies during and after the Egyptian campaign that the many monographs and articles on the subject which appeared about that time were written. The commencement of destructive outbreaks of ophthalmia in the other European armies at various times between 1814 (Russia) and 1849 (Portugal) drew much attention to the subject on the part of medical men (and especially army surgeons) successively in each country of Europe. As a result partly of the study and skill bestowed on it, and partly of other circumstances, the violent forms of ophthalmia did not continue for long to prevail extensively in any one European army, although this comparative freedom from the disease was not attained till large numbers had been partly or entirely blinded by it in several countries. The importance attached however, both by the medical profession and the lay public, to pre- valent destructive ophthalmia, has to a large extent been inherited in the present generation by its milder congeners; by forms of the disease which were common enough long before army oph- thalmia, or Egyptian ophthalmia, were current phrases. The attention given to these milder and more protracted forms of ophthalmia is, however, due in part to other circumstances than the direct transmission of a newly created interest. Advances made in healthy and morbid anatomy have been the means of attracting notice to changes which could not have received the necessary atten- tion without the light of our fuller knowledge. The superior claims of various very fatal diseases, e. g.} smallpox, typhus and dysentery, in earlier days when'these were very prevalent in closely packed bodies of people, prevented close attention being given to such relatively unimportant affections as epidemic ophthalmise until a l