Medicine: Eye for an Eye

In New Orleans’ teeming Charity Hospital two destitute farmer-patients, John Wesley Amos, 68, and Frank Chabina, 19, found that they also had in common blindness in their left eyes. Quicklime had seared the youth’s, cataract bleared the oldster’s. Last week old John Wesley Amos told Charity Hospital eye surgeons: “Frank’s been very good to me. Not many young fellows would bother to cheer up an old man like the way Frank’s done. If you figure one of my eyes can help Frank see, I want you to take my eye and give it to him.”

So the ophthalmologists enucleated the old man’s left eye, stripped it of part of its transparent cornea which they immediately substituted for the young man’s opaque cornea. So commonplace has this eye operation become (corneal grafts may be taken from the eyes of stillborn babies or persons who have just died) that Charity Hospital surgeons assured Frank Chabina that within two weeks he would probably see as well as ever. Commented the grateful old donor: ”It looks a lot different to an old man like me than to a young fellow with all his life ahead of him.”