THE EYE.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume IX, Issue 15, 9 April 1892, Page 379

THE EYE.

No organ of the body is liable to a greater variety of ailments than the eye. More than forty such diseases are enumerated in medical works.

Some of these tend toward blindness, partial or complete. Some are highly contagious. Some are peculiar to the earliest stages of infancy ; some to old age. Some are due to other diseases ; some originate with the eye itself : some are the result of external wounds. Some are brought on by the improper use of the eye ; some by the abuse of other organs. Some are partially or wholly curable ; others are not.

As we have two eyes, the loss of one does not materially affect the sight. The double provision is a wise and benevolent one in the case of an organ exposed to so many accidents from without and so many diseases from within. The value of the sight is never fully appreciated until it is lost or impaired. Few persons realise that the eye is an intricate piece of mechanism, with a vastly more complex and delicate adjustment than the costliest watch. Even in our public schools the children and youth are allowed to abuse it in a most perilous way, the teachers seeming to be perfectly ignorant of probable disastrous results. To say nothing of the thousands of the hopelessly blind, let any one go to the many eye-infirmaries of our land, and witness the streams of patients constantly pouring thiough them, and to the offices of our numerous oculists, and see them, forenoon and afternoon, filled with sufferers patiently waiting their turn, and he will certainly come to feel the urgent need on the part of the community in general of a more intelligent and conservative use of the eyes. It is a disgrace to our educational institutions that half of our students bring away from them myopic—shortsighted—eyes, and that, in our public schools, children who have hardly reached their teens become life long slaves to spectacles, formerly regarded as the almost exclusive badge and burden of old age. And it must be remembered that short-sightedness is not a mere inconvenience, but a disorder that tends toward ultimate visual disorganization. Some of the graver troubles of the eyes are liable to extend from one eye to the other. To prevent this, and thus to save the sight, it has long been the practice to take out —enucleate—the diseased eye, and insert a glass one in its place. But artificial eyes often become sources of irritation, and more recently it has been proposed simply to sever the optic nerve, through which the morbid extension from one eye to the other is believed to take place. Of course in some diseases enucleation would still be necessary.