GLAUKOMA AND GLAUCOMA.

Abstract

Glaukoma is an ancient Greek noun meaning glaze, such as the silveriness of the sea, the waxy bloom on a plum or a grape, or the dull sheen or glint of an eye that has lost its brightness. glaze of death over his eyes. Glaukoma is no definite morbid entity but merely the off-color lack-luster appearance of a blind eye. Least of all does it mean opacity of the crystalline lens, cataract, as defined in Liddell and Scott's Greek-English Lexicon—a definition palpably wrong, for the ancient Greeks had no concept whatever of cataract as such. Nor can glaukoma mean glaucoma, which only in very modern times has been recognized as an entity. Glaukoma to the ancient Greeks was simply glaze, a visible objective manifestation of partial or complete blindness. All dictionary definitions of ancient medical words are suspect, tending to be vitiated by the almost unavoidable fallacy of interpreting ancient medical words in terms of modern knowledge. The ancients knew nothing of pathology as we know it, and their whole concept of ocular pathology hardly extended beyond the concept of blindness, with very little differentiation. In general ancient medical terms have