A letter to the Right Honourable and Honourable the Directors of Greenwich Hospital, containing an exposure of the measures resorted to, by the medical officers of the London Eye Infirmary, for the purpose of retarding the adoption, and execution of plans for the extermination of the Egyptian ophthalmia from the Army, and from the Kingdom, submitted for the approval of Government, by Sir William Adams.

  • Adams, Sir William, 1783-1827.
Date:
1817
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A letter to the Right Honourable and Honourable the Directors of Greenwich Hospital, containing an exposure of the measures resorted to, by the medical officers of the London Eye Infirmary, for the purpose of retarding the adoption, and execution of plans for the extermination of the Egyptian ophthalmia from the Army, and from the Kingdom, submitted for the approval of Government, by Sir William Adams. 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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    b}^ the Adjutant-Genera], some time after Mr. Saun- ders's posthumous work had appeared in 1811, and ventured to assert the practicability of curing the granulations of the lids, together with the opa- cities which had been caused by them, occasioning blindness, 1 was treated with ridicule, and even in- sult, by the late Director-General, untill demonstrated, by producing patients whom I had actually cured, the truth of my pretensions, and then the conviction of his former erroneous opinions, induced him re- peatedly to acknowledge, that he was not aware of the general existence of the form of disease in ques- tion ; in fact, that he knew nothing of the nature and seat of the granulations, till he saw me evert the upper eye-fids, an operation which he declared he had never before witnessed. Nay, it was afterwards asserted to me, by the surgeon of the York Military Hospital at Chelsea, that any promise of removing the opacities of the cornea, w ould be in direct contradiction to every established pathological principle*. Here then it must evidently appear, that if I had not absolutely pro'oed by my own practice, the possibility of curing them, any publication of mine, would have been as unnoticed as that of Mr. Saunders. As already stated, my practice was immediately adopted * The invariable languas^e held to me by every army surgeon, w'lih whom I conversed on this subject, during the first trials of my practice, was, that my cur- ing Parsons would equally convince them of its efficacy as the cure of any number of cases. The opacities in this man's eyes were so dense and exten- sive, that I was dissuaded from selecting him by the late Director-General, whose candour upon this occasion induced him to declare, it was too bad a case for a fair trial of my practice. After his vision was sufficiently restored for every purpose of life, he was accidentally met by the Director General, who, the patieut informed me, would scarcely believe him to be the person whom he, and the luedicai oSicers at York Hospital, had so confidently pronounced incurable.