One hundred consecutive operations for senile cataract, complicated and uncomplicated / by John B. Story.

  • Story, John B.
Date:
1895
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: One hundred consecutive operations for senile cataract, complicated and uncomplicated / by John B. Story. 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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    but I am incHned to attribute it rather to the more satis- factory heaHiig of the operation wound, and the healthier condition of the eye-ball afterwards. The reaction I have pbserved after a simple extraction is usually less than after a combined operation. The gi-eat bug-bear of the simple operation is prolapse of the iris. This occm-red five times (Nos. 33, 38, 42, 54, 100). All the cases were successful; visual acuity being tf» and |. The treatment adopted was excision and cauterisation, after which iodoform powder was dusted on the wound. In one of these cases a small cystoid cicatrix resulted, and in another secondary glaucoma, which was cm-ed by sclerotomy with incision through the sphincter of the iris. The most that can be brought forward against the simple extraction from an examination of the present series of operations is that the convalescence may have been unduly protracted in about 12 per cent, of the cases, against which it may be asserted that the convalescence was more rapid in the remaining 88 per cent, of the operations, and the visual acuity obtained much higher. It is obvious that these statistics are not brought forward with the object of advocating any particular method of performing the operation of cataract extraction. The only conclusion that can be drawn from them is that success can be obtained by either of the two rival methods, and there does not seem much to choose between the two. This conclusion is really only what anyone who has glanced at the literature of the subject would expect. Operators of immense experience in all quarters of the globe are loud in praises of one or the other method, and I do not thiiSk the time has yet arrived when we can come to a final conclusion as to which is the better. The antiseptic precautions adopted in all the cases were the following:—