With hindsight: corneal transplant

For surgeons in the mid-19th century, dealing with corneal opacities was difficult enough. If treatment was unsuccessful, or the cornea was completely opaque, there was little that could be done. But this did not stop some pioneers speculating about or experimenting with transplanting corneal tissue to an affected eye.

At the outset, as Henry Williams (Diseases of the Eye, 1869) says of corneal opacity, one should 'know how to distinguish the cloudiness accompanying actual disease from the opacity resulting from affections which have passed away, leaving these effects behind them and should know what amount of change is to be expected in the future, either from the process of nature or the results of treatment.'