Medical epidemics : glaucoma and iridectomy : a review.
- Wilde, William Robert Willis, 1815-1876.
- Date:
- 1860
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Medical epidemics : glaucoma and iridectomy : a review. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.
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![pating [by about half a year] the analysis of the cases success- fully operated upon,” states Dr. Bader, “ it may be said that in about eighty cases the operation has had a favourable and, so far, a lasting resultlasting, certainly so far as ever seeing again is concerned, but we are not quite sure that they are likely to last in the same quiescent condition they were in before iri- dectomy was performed. That iridectomy does not cure the intra-ocular pressure is let out where the reporter says: “A second portion of iris was excised in two cases, and the distended section (new increase of intra-ocular pressure) was punctured in two others.” We think it not unlikely that our readers have, ere this, said to themselves: this is not a review of Graefe’s paper, but of the record of the operations performed in England upon his principle. Such is, we acknowledge, to a certain extent true. Graefe’s doctrines, as published by the Sydenham Society, are plausible; but in a practical science of this nature we require something more than doctrines; cases must be given, and Graefe was wiser than hiscountrymanofthe London Ophthalmic Hospital, and kept his cat in his bag. Furthermore, we have no objection to the country of Hahnehmann, Preissnitz, and De Loev, having also the honour of inventing the new cure for glaucoma; our object is to arrest the spread of the epidemic in England. It has been constantly asked, even by those who should know better, what harm do these operations do;—patients are blind, and cannot be made worse; surely, it may be tried. Such questions come badly from the Dublin school of patho- logy. They do harm by bringing operative surgery into dis- repute ; most of our hospital surgeons are also public teachers, the guardians of medical literature, and should remember that, although they may not risk the patient’s eye or his life, they do risk their own credit and that of the art of which they are the ministers. Would such practitioners operate for stone in cases of diseased bladder or kidneys, or upon arteries in persons with diseased hearts, or remove the local exhibition of cancer while the system is permeated by that virus, or ampu- tate limbs where fatal disease exists in the viscera? Was it not prophetic, and, perhaps. Intended for some of those persons we have alluded to in the foregoing, that, more than half a cen- tury ago, Beer, the father of German ophthalmic surgery, wrote in \nsLehre von den Augenheilkunde,—“glaucoma and cataracta viridis, being both the results of inflammation of the eye, must be classed amongst the incurable diseases, because always asso- ciated with a great amount of general varicosity of the blood-](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22331797_0026.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
