86 PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. [ANNO 1797. 



can only be removed by absorption, which is best effected by the application of very 

 stimulating medicines. On these principles all ligamentous structures require a 

 treatment peculiar to themselves, which may be illustrated both in inflammations of 

 joints and of the cornea of the eye ; the applications made use of with the greatest 

 advantage in both cases being of a very stimulating kind. 



The advantages attending this mode of treating the cornea were probably disco- 

 vered by accident ; and when they were ascertained, it established itself as a very 

 general practice. It must however, in the hands of those who had no general 

 principle to direct their practice, have been sometimes applied without benefit, and 

 must sometimes have been injurious. It is an extremely curious circumstance, and 

 probably the most so that can be met with in the history of medicine, that a local 

 application should have been discovered to be of service in a particular disease 2513 

 years ago, that the same application, or those of a similar kind, should have been 

 in very general use ever since, and in all that time no rational principle on which 

 such medicines produced their beneficial effects should have been ascertained. This 

 appears, from the following account, to have been the case with respect to stimu- 

 lating applications to the cornea in a diseased state, and can only be accounted for 

 by a want of knowledge of the structure of the parts, which is an argument of un- 

 common weight in favour of the study of anatomy. 



In the Apocrypha we find, in the book of Tobit *, a very circumstantial account 

 of an opacity of the cornea successfully treated by stimulating applications. It is 

 there treated as a miracle, but we have the authority of Jerome, a father of the 

 church, who wrote in the 4th century, to say, H the church reads the books of 

 Tobit, &c. for examples of life and instruction of manners ; we shall therefore con- 

 sider the account which is given in extracts from the book of Tobit in that view." 



Tob. chap. vi. ver. 2. " When Tobias went down to wash himself in the river Tigris, a fish leaped 

 out of the river and would have devoured him. Ver. 4. The angel of the Lord told him to take out 

 the gall, and put it up in safety. Ver. 6. Tobias asked the angel what was the use of the gall. Ver. 8. 

 As for the gall, said the angel, it is good to anoint a man who hath whiteness in his eyes, and he shall be 

 healed." Chap. xi. ver. 11. " Tobias took hold of his father, and strake of the gall in his father's eyes, 

 saying, be of good hope, my father. Ver. 12. And when his eyes began to smart he rubbed them. 

 Ver. 13. And the whiteness pealed away from the corners of his eyes, and when he saw his son he fell 

 upon his neck +." 



* Tobit was of the tribe of Naphtali, in the city of Thisbe, in Upper Galilee ; he was carried cap- 

 tive to Nineveh, after the extinction of the kingdom of Israel, by Enemasser, or Salmanessar, about the 

 year of the world 3283. Grays Key to the Old Test, and Apoc. p. 554. — Orig. 



+ Since this paper was read before the r. s., my friend Dr. Wells acquainted me with the follow- 

 ing case, published in the Ann. Register for the year 1678. " One of the Paris newspapers gives an 

 account of an extraordinary cure effected by the gall of a barbel, in a case of blindness, in substance as 

 follows : A journeyman watchmaker, named Censier, having heard that the gall of a barbel was the re- 

 medy which Tobias employed to cure his father's blindness, resolved to try its effects on the widow Ger- 

 main, his mother-in-law, whose eyes had for six months been afflicted with ulcers, and covered with a 

 film, which rendered them totally blind : Censier having obtained the gall of that fish, squeezed the 

 liquor out of it into a phial, and in the evening he rubbed it with the end of a feather into his mother's 

 •yes. It gave her great pain for about £ an hour, which abated by degrees, and her eyes watered very 





