PURULENT OPHTHALMIA FROM THE STANDPOINT OF ITS SPECIFIC MICROBIO CAUSE;WITH A PLEA FOR A MORE ENERGETIC, RATIONAL, ABORTIVE TREATMENT WHERE POSSIBLE. Read before the Section on Ophthalmology, at the Forty-fourth Annual Meeting of the American Medical Association at Milwaukee.

Abstract

Progress is the watchword of ophthalmology, and we all wish to avail ourselves of the garnered harvest of the bacteriologist, and apply his well ascertained facts to the orbital corner in which we are specially interested. So much ink has been used; so many brains employed for so many years on this threadbare subject of purulent conjunctivitis that it would seem to be an act of supererogation to again ask attention to it. Yet when we consider its vast importance as a frequent cause of blindness, another modest effort to simplify the apparently different conclusions of equally authoritative observers is excusable. Further than a bare hint that the gonococcus occasionally resides in the discharges of an efflorescent purulent ophthalmia, little isusuallymentioned of this specific microbio cause in the great mass of contemporaneous literature. It would seem that since Neisser of Breslau, in 1879 discovered this diplococcus, the peculiarities