Lectures on diseases of the eye / by Charles Bell Taylor.

  • Bell Taylor
Date:
1888
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Lectures on diseases of the eye / by Charles Bell Taylor. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    10/106 page 6
    in the process of accommodation for near objects. As time passes on, this—shall I call it natural sclerosis ?—increases, until in certain cases the normal relationship of the lens fibres is so changed that it becomes opaque; the patient cannot see, and the surgeon cannot illuminate the fundus of the eye- ball : that is cataract. The lens has become opaque, and, so far from assisting vision, constitutes an actual obstruction to the passage of the rays of light. Would it be possible to restore the transparency of the lens? What a momentous question! As well ask, would it be possible to restore youth? And yet there is no doubt that by judicious treat- ment the progress of senile cataract may be retarded, I have seen benefit from electricity, and quite marvellous results, in certain cases caused by accident, or compHcated with gout, diabetes, and albuminuria. In both these patients, however, the lens is quite opaque—the cataract is fully formed. There is no possibility of any clearing up. The obstruction must be removed, and this can only be done by operation. What operation shall we perform ? Will any surgical pro- cedure short of actual removal of the lens from the organism— that is extraction, as it is called—suffice ? I fear not. If we attempted in either of these cases to disintegrate, macerate, and dissolve the lens in situ by repeated needle operations, we should in all probability only excite iritis, to which aged persons are especially hable. Very likely the inflammation would prove uncontrollable, and we should be driven to extract at last under far more unfavourable conditions than exist at present. Would it be wise, in obedience to the ancient precept, Squamam in oculis emovendam potius quam extrahendam, to attempt to depress the lens, dislodge it from the axis of vision, and thus permit the reproduction of images upon the
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