EYE-GRAFTING FEAT

Taranaki Daily News, 4 January 1935, Page 7

EYE-GRAFTING FEAT

transplanting of cornea. CASES OF BLINDNESS CURED. Remarkable results from the transplantation of the cornea, the clear membrane in front of the eyeball, are reported to have been achieved by Lieut.Colonel E. W. O’Gorman Kirwan, of the Indian Medical Service, in operations at the Medical College Eye Hospital in London. The results are favourably compared with those of the operations in London by which Mr. Tudor Thomas, a Cardiff eye specialist, has restored the sight of several blind people in the last two years. . . tr- j Colonel Kirwan’s patients, two Hindu girls, aged 16 and 20, both suffered from total loss of vision in one eye. In the case of the younger girl part of the cornea of an eye which had been removed from a 25-year-old man owing to injury was used. It was grafted on to her eye by cross stitches in the form of a cartwheel. Six days later the stitches were removed, and there is every hope that the girl’s sight will be restored. In the case of the elder girl a graft was taken from an eye removed from an 80-year-old man Now the girl can count fingers _ held 30ft away, and can read large print. The remarkable facts in her case are the advanced age of the man from whom the cornea was taken, and that he belonged to a different blood group, whereas it is advisable, though not essential, for the patient and donor to belong to the same group.