Definitions and symptoms from journals, Web sites, etc. We live in a different sort of Middle Ages today. Those who seek priests look to words as healing in and of themselves. Yet the public must take this animistic term almost daily from all sources of medical knowledge or attempts thereat. Medicine, on the other hand, lives in history and loves every society-strangling dollar gained from it.
Little concern is there for analysis of causal sequences of failure mechanisms.
Glaucoma' is Latin for 'cataract', which word came from the Greek word for 'gray', in reference to the appearance of a cataract in an eye. It does seem reasonable to separately refer, under some terminology, to a health complaint or objective medical observation centered about damage observed in the head of the optic nerve at the fundus of an eye, or about a defect of vision reported subliminally by its experiencer in an automated field test or consciously otherwise, which characterizes such damage subjectively. From the standpoint of etiology and treatment, this delimiting would seem reasonable. Thus there would seem to be no reason to quarrel with focusing etiological and therapeutic attention to this portion of anatomy by means of some specific terminology. As an auto mechanic does not speak of carburitis whenever a carburetor fails, so it might be considered, as a means of keeping teleological metaphysics out of the picture, that one only speak of failure of an optic nerve head, or of such failure by some term as does not introduce any mysticism, such as 'retinoneural atrophy'.