A practical treatise on the diseases of the eye / by William Mackenzie ; to which is prefixed an anatomical introduction explanatory of a horizontal section of the human eyeball by Thomas Wharton Jones.

Date:
1840
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A practical treatise on the diseases of the eye / by William Mackenzie ; to which is prefixed an anatomical introduction explanatory of a horizontal section of the human eyeball by Thomas Wharton Jones. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    of war, many difficult cases of tins sort must have occurred. Albucasis sliortly relates two which had come under his care. In the one, the w arrow entered at the nasal side of the orhit, and was extracted under K the ear. The patient recovered, without any permanent injury of K the eye. In the other case, a Jew was struck with a large unbarhed S arrow from a Turkish how, under the lower eyelid. It had sunk so 9 deep, that Albucasis reached with difficulty the end of the iron, S where it stuck upon the shaft. This patient also recovered without 9 any serious effect.S Very great force may sometimes he necessary for extracting a foreign body, which has been driven through the walls of the orhit. B Parc’s successful case^® is well known, in which he was obliged, 9 with a pair of farrier’s pincers, to tear away from the Duke of Guise, M the broken end of an English lance, which, entering above the right U eye, and towards the root of the nose, penetrated as far as the space between the ear and the nape of the neck, tearing and destroying vessels and nerves in its course, as wx'll as fracturing the hones ; a la description likely to recall to the classical reader, the fatal wound of Pandarus, in the Iliad :— |J| ”0; (fa/iittf •r^ainKi, /iikas S' tivHn 'Afiiiin 'Pr>as ipfakftct, Xiuxohf S' i^Tlfnrit i^ivraf, SH Tou S' iirS fit* yXSrta-a rafti ^aKxe( arii(fis A'l^/xri S’ •rctoa ttlxTot Case 22.—l^ercy bad under his care a fencing-master, who, in an assaidf, re- ceived so furious a tlirust from a foil on the right eye, that the weapon penetrate<l nearly half a foot into the head, and broke short. The man fell down in a state of insensibility., and very soon the supervening swelling was so great as to conceal the foreign body. In order to lay hold of it, Percy oi)ened and evacuated the con- tents of the eyeball. His forceps not being strong enough, he sent to a clock- maker in the neighbourhood, and borrowed from him a pair of screw-])incers, with iW which he laid hold as tightly as i)0ssible of the broken end of the foil, and thus ■ succeeded in extracting it. The fencing-master died some weeks after, more from the consequences of intemperance than of the injury.'^ f f Commenting on this case, Percy recommends that we should ' t rathef remove the eyeball, than leave large foreign bodies in such a | situation ; and refers, in supjiort of this practice, to a case related : | by Bidloo, in which a splinter of wood was left to come away from f S the orhit by sujipuration. The eye hurst at last, after the most dreadful pain, and after the other eye had been threatened with de- structive sympathetic inflammation. Case 23.—Sabatier notices'^ an instance of wound with a knife, through the upper eyelid,.with injury of the neighbouring edge of the frontal bone. It was_ ^ not, he says, till after four hours’ work, that the surgeon succeeded, by means of 1 a hand-vice, in tearing away the portion of the knife-blade which remaii^d in the I orbit, on account of its projecting so little from the wound. The patient com- J plained of severe pain, as if one had been tearing out his eye. No ill consequence J followed ; the cure was sjieedy, and without any affection of sight. _ _ a G. JJcingers aftei' foreign body is removed. We must not imagine S that, on withdrawing the foreign body from the orhit, the danger is a over. Destructive inflammation of the eye, or even fatal inflamma- R tion of the brain, may follow, as in the case I have just quoted from 9 Percy : nay, the patient has been known suddenly to exjiire imme- diately after the foreign body was removed. ■(