What Eye Doctors Can Do.

Maoriland Worker, Volume I, Issue 6, 20 February 1911, Page 17

What Eye Doctors Can Do.

Only a few years ago, before the daj's of antiseptic surgery, more than 30 per cent, of all operations performed for cataract of the eye were unsuccessful, resulting in permanent and hopeless blindness of the patient. This was because neither the instrument used nor the surgeon's hands were sterilised, and microbes were thus enabled to invade the wound, bringing superlative infection. At the present time only about two operations of this kind out of every hundred fail, and the occurrence of infection in any such case would condemn the physician as a bungler. Cataract, of course, is not, as is popularly supposed, a film that forms over the eye, but merely that the crystalline lens which lies directly behind the little round hole called the pupil becomes opaque. This necessarily implies obscuration of vision, and the only way to get rid of the mischief is to remove the lens bodily. This is accomplished by thrusting a thin-bladed and exceedingly sharp knife downwards into the eye from above, inserting the point at the edge of the cornea (which covers the front of the organ like a watchglass), and making an arc-shaped slit. The capsule that holds the lens is also cut, permitting the latter by the help of gentle pressure to be pushed out and removed. Of course, the watery fluid escapee from the anterior chamber of the eye, but is replaced by Nature within a few days, and the organ is soon as serviceable as ever, though glasses have to be worn to take the place, in an optical sense, of the lens that is gone.