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.

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    being firmly plastered to the capsule of the lens, its area occupied by dense membrane, and the sight so damaged that the sufferer has to be led about. J. E , the young man on whom you saw me perform iri- dectomy in both eyes, was one of these. He lives 200 miles away, was certified as hopelessly blind by the parish surgeon, and only came under my notice through the exertions of a benevolent clergyman. Two other cases, identical with this one, have been recently operated on, and there is one more which I hope to benefit by the formation of an artificial pupil, making four cases of actual blindness, the result of iritis injudiciously treated, which have come under my notice during the last five months. Would it be well, in view of these deplorable cases, to lay down a law that atropine should be employed as a matter of routine practice in all cases of inflam- matory affection of the eyeball, on the ground that it could do no harm and might prevent adhesions ? It would certainly simplify practice very much if such a rule could be adopted, but in point of fact atropine is as injurious in some cases as it is indispensable in others, and although, as we have seen, serious damage is done by the neglect of mydriatics their em- ployment is occasionally fraught with danger and followed by disastrous consequences. In fact, I have at the present time three patients under treatment whose sight has been injured, and one in which it has been destroyed, by the injudicious em- ployment of this valuable remedy. The patient in the women's ward on whom I operated ten days ago is one of these. She is fifty-six years of age, and has been suffering for months past from occasional dimness of vision, and now and then the appearance of a halo round the flame of artificial light. These symptoms, although the portents of glaucoma, were only tran-
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