Gift To Mark Saving Of Sight

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30610, 28 November 1964, Page 16

Gift To Mark Saving Of Sight

Equipment which could save the sight and perhaps the lives of children afflicted with retino-blastoma, a type of cancer affecting the retina of the eye, will be provided to the North Canterbury Hospital Board as a gift from the father of a youth whose sight was saved by an eye-surgeon, aided by a radiologist and by apparatus improvised for the purpose by the board’s physicist, Mr J. J. Tait.

The equipment, which will cost about £6OO, will be available to all New Zealand hospitals. The father has already presented a cheque for the amount.

A piece of brass flew into the youth’s eye while he was working in his father’s workshop. The eye-surgeon had begun preparations to remove the object when the cornea started to cloud over. Sympathetic opthalmia set in in the other eye, and there was a threat that the youth might lose the sight of both eyes.

Often a piece of metal can be removed from an eye by magnetic means, but brass is non-magnetic and some other device was necessary. Mr Tait suggested some use could

be made of the tiny electrical impulse resulting when the brass was touched by forceps made of another metal, and he arranged for an amplification of the impulse to give an audible click. He and his assistants worked the whole of a Saturday to assemble the equipment, which was used by the radiologist and surgeon to locate the piece of brass and remove it. The surgeon was asked by the father what gift might be made in recognition of the saving of the boy’s eyesight, and it was suggested

that applicators could be bought to enable radiotherapy to be applied to eyes afflicted with retino-blastoma. The condition is very rare, on average only one or two cases a year occurring in New Zealand, and applicators have not so far been provided at any hospital in the country. The father of the youth, in promising the gift, specified that although the North Canterbury Hospital Board will have control of the applicators they must be made available to any other hospital authority on request. Several applicators are needed to meet variations in eye size and in the form of the retinoblastoma.