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.

    90/106 page 86
    Hitherto, Gentlemen, I have been speaking exclusively of Bacterial purulent ophthalmia, a disease which, so far as the infant and infection from the maternal passages are concerned, must occur within the fifth day of birth or not at all; and it is well that you should note this, because, of course, a baby may get a cold in its eye, just the same as you or I, Such acci- dents are, however, for the most part trivial, infrequent, and readily dealt with by the simplest remedies. It is different, however, when catarrhal ophthalmia attacks older children or adults living in common, in barracks, schools, reformatories, poor-houses, prisons, asylums, refuges, penitentiaries, and the like, where the inmates are often overcrowded and placed under defective hygienic conditions ; for the disease, which is highly contagious,—nay, more, under certain circumstances, infectious, — spreads rapidly; is apt to assume what is termed the follicular form ; to develope minute bodies beneath the conjunctival epithelium, resembling sago grains ;* and to culminate in that horrible, chronic and intractable disease which we know as trachoma (r/jaxo's, rough), or granular lids. These defective hygienic conditions, combined with filth, misery and overcrowding, exist to a high degree in Egypt, the cradle of the arts and sciences, and as Haller has remarked, CoBcorum in omni tempore facunda nutrix, where the cold nights, the heavy dews, the hot days, the glare, the atmosphere * Sattler says the disease is caused by a microzoon which he calls the diplococcus of trachoma. It is a small ball, cleft by a tiny line, very like the gonococous of Neisser, but it may be cultivated ia various soils, whereas the gonococous of Neisser can only be cultivated in the serum of the blood. Speaking on this point, Mr. Power, in his admirable lectures on Bacteriology, says :— The diplococcus of trachoma has its seat inside the trachoma follicles, but outside the cells, not on the surface, but in the follicles of the conjunctiva: hence the method of squeezing, cutting, or scratching out the follicles is bacteriologically correct.
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