Los Angeles herald., 1906-04-01

= EVENLY thousand people In the
United States are wearing glass
eyes, and if the proportion of in
constant, in ten years there will be
100, 900 wearers of glass eyes in this
country.
A flying splinter in the air, speck
of steel from some big building under
construction, a chip of stone from the
stone-cutter's block may lodge in the
eye of the passerby and cause endless
complications. The perforation of the
outer covering of the eye by foreign
bodies was one of the chief causes
for taking the eye out, enucleation as it
is called, until the development Of
X-ray surgery, which has saved the
sight of many eyes by locating the
foreign body in time for it's safe re-
moval.
One of the commoner diseases fol-
lowing the lodgment of foreign body
in the eye, and generally requiring
enucleation, is sympathetic opthalmla,
an affection of the unharmed eye,
which Is marked at first by dread of
the light, pain, and gradually increas-
ing QlInneSS OF NlSlO0. Before tNe
sight in both eyes Is irretrievably lost
the exciting eye has to be removed.
Other common diseases whose removal
often depends upon enucleation are
sarcoma. or malignant tumor, and alb
solute glaucoma, or hard eyeball."
Eye surgery, the most delicate and
intricate in the scope of medical science,
is making enormous progress toward
complete surety in its operations 1t Is
i sar,f,, ,NrFr N1-N
grandfathers would regard with amaze
ment. But one much advertised feat
it has never accomplished, despite
numberless announcements in the press
to that effect, and that is laying out
the eyeballs on the cheek while they
were variously operated upon and re-
placing them with success.
A patient at a New York post
graduate medical school and hospital
recently underwent a rather difficult
operation on one eye, and to make his
story more thrilling he described with
much dramatic coloring how there
We're forty to fifty docthors sitting in
rows and rows above me, like it was at
the theayter, all thin docthors being
students from iverywheres in this
country and from the ould country,
an some haythens from Japan, an
vans from England an, well they was
tnere from all over Ine world just TO
learn off of me what to do whin they
wint back to their own patients-an'
whn the surgeon who was COIN all the
business. the big bug, I name, in the
hospital-why, people would pay him
thousand doll~rs to have him opyrate
on their eyes, and l didn't have to pay
i'm a cint-why, whin he tux out my
eyes an they was hanging on my
cheeks like you read about, all thin
fellers thought it was so great that
they came down to look at thin close,
an some of thin TUX pictyure of me
as lay there with my eyes out; an If
ye don't believe it, ye can ask to see
wan of thin pictyures."
This thrilling experience found it's
way into print, but it receives the mark
of absolute discredit from the "big
bug" himself. who forcibly remarked
that "All these reports about remov-
ing the eyes and then replacing them
are pure and utter nonsense. The eye
cannot be lifted one-eighth of an inch
from it's socket without destroying the
sight for ever"
So, when the eye comes out, it is out
for all time. and only a glass eye can
be substituted. and in this way the
work of the hospital is supplemented