Lectures of the diseases of the eye / by Charles Bell Taylor.

  • Taylor, Charles Bell, 1829-1909.
Date:
1888
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Lectures of the diseases of the eye / by Charles Bell Taylor. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by UCL Library Services. The original may be consulted at UCL (University College London)

    17/104 (page 15)
    IS have administered some general anaesthetic ? I will reply to these questions seriatim, and first with regard to age. Age per se is certainly no contra-indication. Cataract is a disease of old age, and if we did not extract for patients advanced in life we should not operate at all. I was once called to see a gentleman suffering from cataract in his eightieth year, and strongly recommended operation ; his wife, however, would not allow him. to submit, on account, as she said, of his great age. Six years later she died; the widower then sent for me, was operated on, and recovered most excellent sight—so good that he was able to complete an archaeological work on which he was engaged when his sight first failed. I have operated with perfect success upon both eyes in three patients over ninety, and upon a considerable number between eighty and ninety years of age. Lord Lyndhurst, the then Nestor of the House of Lords, was operated upon in his ninetieth year. The first eye was lost, but, with characteristic courage, he underwent the operation again and recovered excellent sight with the second eye. In fact, the hard senile cataract is more readily extracted than the less mature varieties of the same affection ; and although persons of great age are generally very feeble and suffer from various senile affections, this, so far as my experience goes in hundreds of cases, does not seem to interfere very materially with the success of the operation. As to pre- Uminary treatment, no doubt it is of the utmost importance that patients undergoing operation should be in a fair state of health. No doubt preparatory treatment similar to that adopted in the training of athletes would increase our chances of success if it were possible to carry it out, but experience teaches us that directions of this kind are never carried out at home, and admission to hospital only has a depressing effect.