Volume 2

The collected papers of Sir W. Bowman, Bart., F.R.S / edited for the committee of the "Bowman Testimonial Fund" by J. Burdon-Sanderson and J. W. Hulke.

  • Bowman, William, Sir, 1816-1892.
Date:
1892
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The collected papers of Sir W. Bowman, Bart., F.R.S / edited for the committee of the "Bowman Testimonial Fund" by J. Burdon-Sanderson and J. W. Hulke. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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

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    observing, each one for himself, with minute and accurate attention, the realities of disease and the effects of remedies, but rather, by opening the subject, and acquainting you with the general outlines, to remove the first difficulties from your path, and to stimulate your minds with a foretaste of the pleasure which all will certainly experience, who devote themselves to the earnest pursuit of knowledge in the field before us. In the arrangements for the present season the task has devolved upon myself of giving you some account of certain structures of the eyeball, which are of primary consequence to the practitioner, as being those involved in the operations he will be called on to perform, and also as being the seat of several of the more common, as well as severe, morbid actions which affect the organ. That you may form some estimate of the importance of that class especially which belongs to the cornea, I may mention a circumstance which I remarked with concern during a visit to that noble institution, the School for the Indigent Blind, in St. George's Fields. It was this—that a very large number of all the cases of total and irremediable blindness which those walls receive are the result of inflammations of the front of the eye, its transparent inlet having been darkened or destroyed by the ravages of disease, which we are quite sure might, in a great majority of instances, have been controlled by skilful and timely treatment. These cases occur amongst the poor—a class to whom the eye is, if possible, even more valuable than to the rich, because without it they can hardly obtain their daily bread, or enjoy the common comforts of existence—a class, too, among whom it is probable that most of you will be called on to minister during the early years of your professional life. More than this, I think, need not be said to impress you with the importance of the subject which is about to engage our attention. It would be easy to expatiate on the utility of an exact knowledge of the structure of the body to one who desires to study that body in its morbid states; but I am willing to hope that such an argument would be almost superfluous; and at any rate (that I may not detain you any longer on introductory topics) I shall content myself with observing, that, though a man of genius has now and then become a great physician, like Hippoceates or Sydenham, by an acute and persevering observation of disease, and of the effects of remedies, and without much acquaintance with anatomy, yet that the common voice of mankind proclaims that he who best knows the mechanism of the body, will, with a like study of the other departments of medicine, be the best able to comprehend the actions of that body, both in health and disease. General View of the Eyeball. The eyeball, gentlemen, as you know, consists primarily and essentially of a sheet of nervous matter visually endowed—that is, capable of being so affected by light,