HAUPT— TOBIT'S BLINDNESS AND SARA'S HYSTERIA. 91 



l)y droppings of a bird, when he was asleep out of doors. The 

 Greek text has leuconiata, i.e., opacities of the cornea. Recent 

 corneal opacities may clear spontaneously, especially in children, but 

 all applications to dispel the opacity of old scars are useless. Tobit 

 is said to have been 58 when the trouble began, and it had lasted for 

 eight years before his son applied the preserved gall of the fish he 

 had caught in the Tigris. Modern oculists tattoo the white spots 

 with India ink, so that they are no longer seen against the black 

 pupil of the colored iris. The gall applied by Tobias must have 

 been evaporated and dried. Ox-gall, i.e., the bitter fluid secreted by 

 the liver of the ox, is used in water-color painting to make the colors 

 spread more evenly ; mixed with gum arable, it thickens and fixes the 

 colors. Black-lead or crayon drawings are set with a coating of 

 ox-gall. If you add ox-gall to lamp-black in water you obtain a 

 serviceable sepia. Tobias may have mixed with the gall the charcoal 

 obtained by calcining the heart and liver of the fish (EB 455). The 

 Egyptian ladies paint their eyelids w^ith the soot of charred frank- 

 incense (EB" 14, 350^). 



Ebstein's remark in his book on Medicine in the Old Testament 

 (Stuttgart, 1901) p. 164, that this use of gall, liver, and heart may 

 be regarded as the first case of Brown-Sequard's organotherapy, is 

 gratuitous. These organs were not administered internally by 

 Tobias. Ebstein, who was Professor of Medicine in Gottingen, 

 published also books on Medicine in the New Testament (1903) and 

 the plague described by Thucydides (1899). He died in 1912. 

 Brown-Sequard, who was for three years professor of physiology 

 and neuropathology at Harvard, was the successor of Claude Ber- 

 nard in the chair of experimental medicine at the College de France. 

 In 1889 he advocated the hypodermic injection of a fluid, prepared 

 from the testicles of sheep, as a means of prolonging human life. 

 He was nearly yy when he died in 1894. Organotherapy is much 

 older than Brown-Sequard. For many years pepsin has been used 

 for dyspepsia, and from time immemorial savages have been accus- 

 tomed to eat the hearts of lions and other wild animals, under the 

 belief that they will thereby obtain courage and strength like that 

 of the animal from which the heart had been taken (EB" 26, 798"). 



PROC. AMER. PHTL. SOC.,'VOL.^LX,''g, DEC. 20,'l92I. 



