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Waiting at the hospital this morning I read about optical surgeries in the cheap xeroxed pamphlets on the table. One reverses retinal detachment; another lowers intraocular pressure (“the what”). A third procedure removes cataracts. “To see again is to live again!” the brochure advertises. This is the curious semantic which leads me, to investiage later that evening--being 1) a, and 2), XYZ.
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. Yet etymology suggests a deeper ontological connection. The word cataract comes from the Greek term katarrhaktēs or “down-rushing.” Commenting on a passage in Chrysippus, in X, Simplicius used the term ὑποχυθέντας, meaning “to spill” or “to pour under.” In the Middle Ages, Guy de Chauliac wrote that cataract was caused by “an extensive moisture which gradually penetrates into the eye and, in consequence of cold, coagulates” (System of Op XI, 65), as did Ibn Sina, in 1025, naming it nozul-al-maa—“water-falling disease.” It is not difficult to read this logic in the xeroxed medical diagrams which show light cascading through the narrow opening of the iris and pouring into the optical cavern like water.
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This rainbowed plumage, rising up in great, soft-bellied drifts, billows over the waterfall at all hours, as Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote, in all conditions, “without a cloud, save those of the cataracts.” In winter it put Hennepin in mind of summer, the great plumes rising “no matter how hot it is”; in December it met Andrew Ellicott as a “beautiful crystalline appearance” frozen in the trees. François-René de Chateaubriand likened it to the “thick smoke of a vast forest fire”; Harriet Beecher Stowe likened to moonlight, “falling as the soul sinks when it dies, to rise refined, spiritualized, and pure.” Dickens too found it thanatic, writing 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.”
The most unusual description, however, came from Robert McCausland’s “An account of an earthy substance, found near the Falls of Niagara, and vulgarly called the Spray of the Falls,” submitted to the Royal Society in X. The subject of McCausland’s experiments—the strange “earthy substance” at the base—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,” McCausland wrote, “sometimes lying loose amongst the stones on the beach, and sometimes adhering to the rocks, or appearing between the layers upon breaking them.” Under what the mist had become some what rock, a coveted what that visitors such as Captain Enys scoured the Falls collecting the rock “which is said to be the Spray of the Fall, petrified.” The indigenous Neuter tribe once settled in the basin had controlled a special trade in this hardened “Spray of the Fall,” believed to harbor certain medicinal healing properties. In one of the earliest mentions of Niagara Falls, sometime in the 1640’s, 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.”
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Around this time, in the late 1700s, cataract surgery reached North America. It arrived with Dr. William Stork, an oculist learned in London, who travelled up and down the eastern seaboard “couching” patients in Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York. His customers issued their satisfied testimonials in the papers: “I John Conrad, of Upper Dublin, Philadelphia County, do certify, that having lost my Sight seven Years ago, was restored to it again by Dr. Stork, although I am in my 81st Year…” Two years later Dr. William Stork retired to Florida and became a plantation agent, where he “died with the fright” during a servant uprising, and in his place cropped up replacements. A Dr. John Bartlett established in Newport, Rhode Island, and a Dr. De Lacoudre in Norfolk, Virginia. In 1770 the Pennsylvania Gazette announced the practice of one Dr. Anthony Yeldall, who “couches cataracts in the eyes, and cures all distempers incident thereto.”
Then Frederick W. Jericho arrived in Philadelphia in 1783. At Utrecht, Jericho had written his thesis on a new method called extracapsular extraction: “The lower part of the semi-circular cornea is cut obliquely by the very edge of the knife, after which all the aqueous humor at once flows forth from the eye,” he wrote, and the cloud “is pushed forward through the pupil, and it falls at once from the eye.” On March 30, 1784, Mr. Christopher Rex—the recipient of perhaps the first extracted cataract in the United States—published his endorsement in the Pennsylvania Packet: “I take this method of testifying my experience of his superior abilities, from which I have derived the happy restoration of sight, after for years of blindness by a cataract on both eyes.”