The Practitioner - 1869 Author:Unknown Author Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CONTRIBUTIONS TO OPHTHALMIC THERAPEUTICS, BY ROBERT DRUDENELL CARTER, F.R.C.Si HINTS ON THE TREATMENT OP IRITIS. Iritis is one of the few forms of disea... more »se in which it is never sufficient that the surgeon should watch over a recovery, but in which he is always called upon to endeavour to effect a cure, Recovery, or what passes for recovery will take place in the great majority of instances, but such recovery leaves behind it the fruitful seeds of subsequent and eventually destructive changes. I speak from an experience gained chiefly in pro vincial ophthalmic hospitals, when I say that iritis which has not been cured, but in which a so-called recovery has taken place, is very prominent among the actual causes of blindness. Not always a very severe, or painful, or long-continued form of ophthalmia, there are probably many eases of its occurrence in which medical aid is not sought at all. People say they have had " a cold in the eyes," but that it soon got better ; and even when medical aid has been sought, the result is not always everything that could be desired. A large number of pracj titioners still go into the world from schools of medicine at which ophthalmic teaching is conspicuous by its absence ; and the effects of this absence are seldom more clearly displayed than by patients in whom iritis has been either overlooked or maltreated. Maltreatment mostly takes the direction of some irritating application to the conjunctiva—such as sulphate of copper or nitrate of silver—and the usual result is, that the whole of the inner circle of the iris becomes adherent to the anterior capsule ; the outer circle will then be projected forward by the increase and accumulation of fluid behind it, and theretina will be subjected to continually increasing pressure, until the case at...« less