Medicine: Eye-For-Eye

One sunny afternoon last May, 61-year-old Frank Hoffman, who was working on a farm outside Hagerstown, Md., began to disinfect the barn with a high-pressure spraying hose. Suddenly the machine jammed, backfired, showered Hoffman with carbolic acid and lime. He whipped out his bandanna handkerchief, rubbed his eyes, and despite the searing pain continued working. In a few days Farmer Hoffman was stone blind.

Several weeks ago, when the infection following the burn had abated, Hoffman went to Hagerstown, and asked Dr. Paul Nelson Fleming if he would ever be able to see again. Dr. Fleming examined his eyes, discovered that the fragile, shell-like corneas were completely useless, that each lens and iris had grown together in a tangled mass. He told Hoffman that he could only experiment, but Hoffman was willing to try anything. At Washington County Hospital Dr. Fleming removed the scarred cornea from Hoffman’s right eye, straightened out the lens and iris as best he could. No human eyes were available, so he removed the cornea from the eye of a white giant rabbit and stitched it over Hoffman’s iris. Last week Hoffman declared that he could see light, and when a nurse moved her fingers before his eyes at unannounced intervals Hoffman “called her hand.”

Greatly astonished was towheaded, 47-year-old Dr. Fleming. “Frankly, I didn’t think it would work,” said he. “I have performed numerous eye operations, but this is the first in which I have ever used the cornea of a rabbit. The difference between the human cornea and the rabbit cornea is that the latter is larger and deeper. If this operation proves successful I will perform a second operation on Hoffman’s right eye, using the rabbit cornea as a base, and over this graft a human cornea. Whether or not his sight will again be normal, or near normal, is problematical.”

Enterprising reporters from Baltimore, Washington and New York soon discovered that Dr. Fleming had a big reputation among Hagerstown folk for his ingenious operations. Two years ago, when a patient was brought to him with trachea and larynx squeezed together by an automobile accident, he made an incision in her throat, inserted a rubber tube, and thus provided a firm wall around which a “new” windpipe could grow. Fourteen weeks later he removed the tube, and after a few minor operations, the patient was again able to swallow and talk.