History of Glaucoma

3493 Words14 Pages
History of Glaucoma The term glaucoma goes back to hippocratic times. Its meaning is disputed; generally accepted to signify greenish -- like the colour of sea water -- Hirschberg has shown that it is much more likely to mean bluish. It would appear that in Hippocratic writings hypochyma and glaucosis were synonyms, and both vaguely referred to cataract. It is only with later Greek writers that a distinction was made between the two, glaucoma becoming the incurable condition as opposed to hypochyma which was curable, though not always so. Glaucoma which came also to stand for an affection of the lens itself, as opposed to cataract, which was a perverted humour in front of the lens. It is not at all unlikely that the term was applied indiscriminately to all blindness not considered as cataract and in which the pupil changed its colour. Absolute glaucoma with its "green cataract", as well as pupillary exudates, were probably included. Whatever else it may have stood for, it certainly did not stand for chronic glaucoma of today, for in this, as well as in the bulk of acute glaucoma, the discoloration of the pupil is not a striking feature. In any case it would only be the terminal stage of chronic glaucoma that would be recognized and this no doubt passed as amblyopia, amaurosis or, in later day as suffusio nigra or gutta serena. Glaucoma, in antiquity, therefore hardly stood for any definite entity. But the term created a problem in pathology when Brisseau showed that cataract was a disorder of the lens itself. Some, like Maître-Jan were content to let both diseases reside in the lens; others, like Brisseau, monopolized the lens for cataract and satisfied themselves that glaucoma was an affection of the vitreous, a view that led to much anatomical work to show what exactly the changes in the vitreous were. Vitreous fluidity, vitreous floaters and all sorts of
Open Document