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Cataract 1), 2)
1
At the hospital this morning I read about optical surgeries in the pamphlets on the counter. “What Is More Precious Than Your Eyesight?” asks the seagull on the cover, silhouetted against the sun. The first page advertises the use of drainage channels to lower intraocular pressure ($5,422). The second page describes a small gas bubble capable of reattaching the retina ($11,200). Among the black-and-white illustrations on the third page I am surprised to read the phrase “human cataract formation,” and to imagine the medical condition it brings to mind: of a man who has grown a waterfall like a cyst.
Later that night, home from the hospital, it is that image which leads me to investigate whatever obscure relations might exist between the multiple definitions of the word cataract—meaning, 1), a “clouded visual occlusion,” and, 2), a “large waterfall.”
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As it goes, the relationship is not so obscure. An optical cataract occurs when proteins in the lens denature and “cloud” white; rushing water, someone once thought, also “clouds” white. In 2001 John Berger described the extraction of his cataracts as “the removal of a particular form of forgetfulness.” The “passage through this small pain,” he wrote, “was inseparable from my journey towards a newly visible world”[1]. The method of his treatment had arrived in America with an oculist named Frederick Jericho, whose thesis, in 1783, had described extracapsular extraction for the first time. “The lower part of the semi-circular cornea is cut obliquely by the very edge of the knife,” he explained, “after which all the aqueous humor at once flows forth” and the occlusion “is pushed forward through the pupil, and it falls at once from the eye”[2].
Etymology stages an ontological connection. The word cataract comes from the Ancient Greek term katarrhaktēs, meaning “down-rushing.” Commenting on a passage in Chrysippus, Simplicius used the term hypochythentas, from hypocheo, meaning “to spill” or “to pour under”[4]. The contemporary solution consisted of “couching” the occlusion with a curved needle: in most cases, the material was pushed from the visual axis but remained in the eye. Other reports claim the “phlegmatic matter” was blown out through the nose; others, that it was sucked out with a large straw. Ibn Sina, in the Canon of Medicine, named it nozul-al-maa—“water-falling” or “water breaking”[6]. It is not difficult to read this logic into the grainy brochure diagrams which show light cascading through the iris and pouring into the optical cavern.
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Although the words waterfall, cascade, and cataractare now interchangeable, in 1828 Webster’s Dictionary drew a taxonomic distinction between them. According to Noah Webster, the term “waterfall” is “generally used of the fall of a small river or rivulet” (as in a garden or brook), and “cascade” of a feature “less than a cataract.” This leaves to “cataract” a tautology: it is a “cascade upon a great scale.” As a practical example, Webster points to the cataracts “of Niagara, of the Rhine, Danube and Nile.” As a usage example, he points to Washington Irving: “The tremendous cataracts of America thundering in their solitudes”[1]. It is the size of the cataract which brings men to poetry.
Consider the testimony of Charles Dickens, who visited Niagara Falls in 1842. “In an instant, I was blinded by the spray, and wet to the skin,” he wrote. “I saw the water tearing madly down from some immense height, but could get no idea of shape, or situation, or anything but vague immensity.” Then, he writes, “I began to feel what it was.” Standing in the basin, looking up at the Niagara pouring down on him, 5,000,000 lbs. per second, it is not reason but the pleasure of faith which overcomes him. “It would be hard for a man to stand nearer God than he does there,” he writes. The “effect of this tremendous spectacle on me, was peace of mind—tranquility—great thoughts of eternal rest and happiness…”[2].
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The first European to place a number on the “incredible Cataract” at Niagara was Father Louis Hennepin, a recollect missionary with Robert Cavalier de La Salle. In 1683, Hennepin reported that the great cataract plunged “down a height of more than five hundred feet,” culminating in a hell of waters that “foam and boil in a fearful manner”[1]. By the time he published a second description fifteen years later, the “Horrible precipice” had grown only the more terrible in his imagination: now, he wrote, it was “above six hundred foot”—“so prodigious high, that it would make one tremble to gaze steadily upon the water”—and churned in “the most hideous manner imaginable.” The “outrageous Noise,” he claimed, was “more terrible than that of Thunder,” the magnificent spray “so great that it forms a kind of cloud above this abyss”[2].
The impassioned description from Hennepin stood until 1722, when barrister Paul Dudley relayed to the Royal Society an opinion differing “very much from the Account Father Hennepin has given the World of that Cataract”[3]. In Albany, Mr. Dudley had encountered a “French Native of Canada” referred to as Monsieur Borassaw. “When I objected Hennepin’s Account of those Falls to Monsieur Borassaw,” he wrote, the man revealed the cataract was in fact “no more than twenty six Fathom, or an hundred and fifty six Foot” tall, and the “outrageous Noise,” in truth, quiet enough to “converse together close by.” Among his various disproofs, however, one detail was corroborated. Just as Hennepin had claimed, “the Mist or Shower (his Word was La Brume), which the Falls make, is so extraordinary, as to be seen at five Leagues distance, and rises as high as the common Clouds,” said Borassaw. “In this Brume or Cloud, when the Sun shines, you have always a glorious rainbow.”
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This rainbowed plumage, rising up in great, soft-bellied drifts, billows over the waterfall at all hours, in all conditions, “without a cloud, save those of the cataracts,” as Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote[1]. In winter, it put Hennepin in mind of summer, the great plumes rising “no matter how hot it is,” and in August brought George William Curtis to volcanism, the cataract having “cloven the earth to its center, and that, pouring its waters into the fervent inner heat, they hiss into spray” [2,3]. François-René de Chateaubriand likened it to the “thick smoke of a vast fire”; Harriet Beecher Stowe to moonlight, “falling as the soul sinks when it dies, to rise refined, spiritualized, and pure”[4,5]. In his letter to John Forster, Dickens claimed that “the broad, deep, mighty stream seems to die in the act of falling.” “From its unfathomable grave,” he continued, “arises that tremendous ghost of spray and mist which is never laid, and has been haunting this place with the same dread solemnity—perhaps from the creation of the world”[6].
The most unusual description, however, comes from Robert McCausland’s “An account of an earthy substance, found near the Falls of Niagara, and vulgarly called the Spray of the Falls,” communicated by Benjamin Smith Barton in 1789[7]. The subject of McCausland’s experiments—the strange “earthy substance” at the base of the Falls—was an unusual rock-like material thought to be petrified waterfall-mist. “This substance is found, in great plenty, every where about the bottom of the falls,” he wrote, “sometimes lying loose amongst the stones on the beach, and sometimes adhering to the rocks, or appearing between the layers upon breaking them.” The peculiar marble-white ‘mineral’ was coveted by visitors, who clambered along the shore collecting it. The indigenous Neuter tribe who once occupied the basin had controlled a special trade in the hardened mist, believed to harbor certain medicinal properties. In one of the earliest mentions of Niagara Falls, the French Jesuit surgeon Francois Gendron wrote that “the spray forms a stone, or rather a petrified salt, yellowish in colour, which is very effective in the cures of sores, fistulas, and malignant ulcers”[8].
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In 1879, Mr. Charles F. Brush, of the Brush Electric Co., arrived at Niagara to “to throw light upon the descending water and mist”[1]. For power, he partnered with a local developer, Jacob Schoellkopf, whose water-turbines supplied his arc lights, “producing electric rainbows to order in the darkest night.” In addition to the spectacle, the new optic, casting “rays out through the water,” illustrated for Schoellkopf the potential of hydroelectric power. Soon came Schoellkopf Power Stations No. 1, 2, 3A and 3B for the Niagara Falls Hydraulic Power & Manufacturing Co.; then Cataract Construction Co. for the Niagara River Hydraulic Tunnel Power & Sewer Co.; then Edward Dean Adams Power Plant for the Niagara Falls Power Company. By 1905, one-fifth of the river’s natural discharge was being diverted from the Falls to the power-houses, leaving to the wonder a pittance.
When H.G. Wells arrived in Niagara one year later, he discovered the “spectacular effect, its magnificent and humbling size and splendour, were long since destroyed beyond recovery by the hotels, the factories, the power houses, the bridges and tramways and hoardings that arose about It.” Nothing, he wrote, “not even the hotel signs and advertisement boards—could be more offensive to the eye and mind than the Schoellkopf companies’ untidy confusion of sheds and buildings.” “The huge social and industrial process of America will win this conflict and at last capture Niagara altogether”[3].
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Three years later, the United States and Canadian governments signed the International Boundary Waters Treaty and created the International Joint Commission, bringing the Falls under their collective jurisdiction. Then, under the jurisdiction of the International Niagara Board of Control. Then of the Special International Niagara Board, who were to license the aggressive water diversions while guaranteeing a “pleasing impression” for the spectator. Their first enterprise, in 1930, was to establish the meaning of the term “pleasing,” dissecting the cataract in a bureaucratic critique of duteous sections and subsections called “Scenic Beauty as Dependent on Volume,” the “Impression of Contrast,” and the “Relation of Depth to Color.”
The last item, located in Appendix D of The Preservation of Niagara Falls, “The Colour of Niagara Falls,” describes an ambitious experiment that “had never been attempted.” Over several months, color physicist A.B. Clark measured the water of Horseshoe Falls at twenty-six different points using his own invention, the “Clark Telecolourimeter,” to determine the ideal “greenish-blue.” He compiled color ranges from bluest to greenest, 1 to 11, 0.08 to 1.65; weighed the “contrasting” gestalt of brick and ironwork; experimented with crest-height, depth, speed, and light—until, in §III—“Psychological and Aesthetic Considerations”—he turned to consider the “aesthetic value of the spray.” The towering mist-cloud diminishes “the apparent intensity of the color,” he wrote. “A reduction of the spray cloud might materially improve the breadth of the view…”[1].
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This “heavy mist column” was one of the Board’s principal considerations. Once, Monsieur Borassaw had extolled it to Paul Dudley as an “extraordinary” natural effect; now, the Special International Niagara Board wondered whether it did not obstruct the glorious “impression of horizontal extent.” In order to settle the case, The Preservation of Niagara Falls audits the aesthetic verdicts from past “investigators.” Among them are the opinions of Col. J.G. Warren and the USACE, who lamented that the mist “hides a large portion of the Falls almost perpetually,” and Col. A.B. Jones for the US Corps of Engineers, who felt the cloud “obscures the spectacle”; as well as the determination of the Board of Engineers for Rivers and Harbors, signed by Brigadier-General H. Taylor, who believed the mist renders the Horseshoe “inferior as a spectacle to the American Fall,” and recommended interventions “that will reduce the obstructive mist to a minimum”[1,2,3].
The Preservation of Niagara Falls addresses these concerns in paragraphs 21-23 under the sub-heading “Scenic Beauty Dependent Upon Visibility” in Appendix C. “No one will claim that the spray rising from the Falls does not add immensely to their beauty,” the report claims, but “the question does arise, however, as to whether there is not a point at which increasing the volumes of spray no longer add to, but possibly detract from, the spectacle as a whole”[2]. From the “Viewpoints of Past Investigators,” the answer appears almost unanimous. When Charles Dickens described Niagara’s “vague immensity” in 1842, he was not exalting the experience but complaining. “I was not disappointed—but I could make out nothing. In an instant,” he wrote, “I was blinded by the spray…”[3].
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The solution to these concerns was cataract surgery. In 1950, The International Joint Commission established the International Niagara Falls Engineering Board and enlisted two engineering teams to practice remedial interventions on scale models in Ontario and Mississippi. In order to ensure a satisfactory scenic spectacle as defined in paragraph 64, the engineers proposed three interventive measures: an upriver International Control Dam ($14,594,000); the removal of 64,000 and 24,000 cubic yards of rock from the flanks of Horseshoe falls; and the application of 100- and 300-foot fills to the crest ($2,942,000). In addition to the remedial works, the International Niagara Board of Control was to bring the spectacle under an organized regime of visibility, allowing the Falls a “tourist flow” of 100,000 cfs during the high season from 8AM to 10PM, and a discharge of 50,000 cfs at night and through the off-season.
In June 1954 the engineering team broke ground and began to reshape Horseshoe Falls, excavating, filling, and narrowing the crestline more than three hundred feet. On September 28, 1957, Alvin Hamilton, Minister of Natural Resources, dedicated the completed works: “The American side has been enhanced with a greater flow of water, the flanks of the Horseshoe Falls have been re-clothed and the ugly scars removed, an unbroken crestline has been achieved, and the mist cloud, which so often hid much of the beauty of the Horseshoe Falls, has been lessened…”[1].
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Over ten years, the International Niagara Commission discovered that “misty days” at Niagara Falls doubled. In 2006, the New York Times reported on “Two Studies of Increasing Mist”: one indicated the cause to be relative temperature, the other pointed to high-rise developments[1]. In 2023, The Oakes Hotel, owned by Hennepin Realty Holdings and Hennepin’s View Inc., conducted a “mist study” on a proposed redevelopment that predicted an increase in “misting conditions over Table Rock Centre, the Niagara Parkway and the nearby pedestrian walkways as a result of the incremental redirection of the existing mist plume”[2]. Their findings were made an amenity: “At the Oakes Hotel, you can almost feel the mist from the falls when standing in your room or from our observation floor.”
“Upon check out,” one guest wrote, “we complained that the air conditioner was not working the room was very hot and we woke in the middle of the night to water coming out of the ceiling in the washroom over the tub”[3]. Another complained that “water started leaking from the ceiling in our bathroom in the middle of the night. The floor was soaked and slippery. I called the front desk at 4:30am to report it”[4].
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Attached to the reviews are countless blurred photographs of the great mist-plumes rising “high as the common clouds” in winter, summer, and spring, lit up, at night, in bright neon colors, as though the river had died “in the act of falling,” as Dickens wrote, and in its place raised a “ghost of spray and mist” to haunt them[1]. “Mind you there was a lot of mist comming from the horse shoe falls and the lights did not show as well,” one guest writes [2]. “Do to mist, could not see.”
There it is: “Cataract,” like a drop on the lens.
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NOTES
§2.
1. John Berger, “Raising the portcullis: some notes after having cataracts removed from my eyes,” British Journal of General Practice 60, no. 575 (June 2010): 464-465.
2. Frederick W. Jericho, quoted in Christopher Leffler et al., “The first cataract surgeons in Anglo-America,” Survey of Opthamology 60, no. 1 (January 2015): 86-92.
3. Berger, “Raising the portcullis,” 464-465.
4. Juliusz Grzybowski and Andrzej Grzybowski, “Chrysippus and the First Known Description of Cataract Surgery,” Medicines 7, no. 6 (2020): 34.
5. Guy de Chauliac, quoted in System of Opthamology, vol. XI, ed. Sir Stewart Duke-Elder (St. Louis: C.V. Mosby Co., 1969), 65.
6. Ibid.
§4.
1. “Cataract,” An American Dictionary of the English Language, by Noah Webster (New York: S. Converse, 1828).
2. Charles Dickens to John Forster, “Tuesday, April Twenty-sixth, 1842. Niagara Falls!!! (Upon the English Side.),” in Life, Letters, and Speeches of Charles Dickens, vol. 1 (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1894), 167.
§5.
1. Father Louis Hennepin, A Description of Louisiana, trans. John Gilmary Shea (New York: John G. Shea, 1880), 72.
2. Father Louis Hennepin, A New Discovery of a Vast Country in America (London: Henry Bonwicke, 1699), 22-23.
3. Paul Dudley and Monsieur Borassaw, “An Account of the Falls of the River Niagara, Taken at Albany, Octob. 10. 1721. from Monsieur Borassaw, a French Native of Canada. By the Honourable Paul Dudley, Esq; F.R.S.,” in Philosophical Transactions (1683-1775) 32: 69-72.
§6.
1. Nathaniel Hawthorne, “My Visit to Niagara,” in The Dolliver Romance: And Other Pieces (United States: J.R. Osgood, 1876), 99.
2. Hennepin, A Description of Louisiana, 378.
3. George William Curtis, “Lotus-eating: A Summer Book,” in Anthology and Bibliography of Niagara Falls, vol. 1, ed. Charles Mason Dow (New York: J.B. Lyon, 1921), 255.
4. François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand, “Atala,” in Stories by Chateaubriand (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co, 1908), 138.
5. Harriet Beecher Stowe, “Impressions of a visit made in the summer of 1834,” in Anthology and Bibliography of Niagara Falls, vol. 1, ed. Charles Mason Dow (New York: J.B. Lyon, 1921), 188.
6. Dickens to Forster, “Niagara Falls!!!,” 167.
7. Robert M’Causlin and Benjamin Smith Barton, “An Account of an Earthy Substance Found near the Falls of Niagara and Vulgarly Called the Spray of the Falls: Together with Some Remarks on the Falls,” in Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 3 (New York: Kraus Reprint Corporation, 1966), 17-24.
8. Francois Gendron, “De sa Majesté. À Troyes, et à Paris, chez Denys Béchet, 1644–45,” in Anthology and Bibliography of Niagara Falls, vol. 1, ed. Charles Mason Dow (New York: J.B. Lyon, 1921), 20.
§8.
1. “The Electric Light,” The Christian Union, July 23, 1879.
2. “Slaughtering Niagara,” The Evening Statesman, April 5, 1905, 4.
3. H.G. Wells, The Future in America: A Search After Realities (London: Chapman & Hall, 1906), 71-78.
§9.
1. Special International Niagara Board, The Preservation of Niagara Falls: Final Report of the Special International Niagara Board (Ottawa: F.A. Acland, 1930), 134.
§10.
1. Special International Niagara Board, The Preservation of Niagara Falls, 31.
2. Ibid.
3. Board of Engineers for Rivers and Harbors, Diversion of Water from the Great Lakes and Niagara River (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1921), 30.
§12.
1. Alvin Hamilton, “Address at Dedication Ceremony, Niagara Falls, September 28, 1957,” in Daniel Macfarlane, Fixing Niagara Falls (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2020), 3.
§13.
1. Corey Binns, “Two Studies of Increasing Mist at Niagara Falls Find Two Different Culprits,” The New York Times, July 18, 2006.
2. City of Niagara Falls, Report to Mayor and Council: AM-2024-003 – Official Plan & Zoning By-law Amendment: 6546 Fallsview Boulevard & 6503–6519 Stanley Avenue, October 1, 2024, 10.
3. LydfromtheNorth, Tripadvisor, June 2025.
4. Danny P, Tripadvisor, August 2024.
§14.
1. Dickens to Forster, “Niagara Falls!!!,” 167.
2. Robert N, Tripadvisor, June 2013.
3. MithunBh, Tripadvisor, October 2010.