24 
Mr. Home's Lecture 
by a deposition of coagulating lymph during the adhesive state 
of inflammation, which in the cornea renders it opaque. The 
thickening of the parts remains after the inflammation is gone, 
and can only be removed by absorption, which is best effected 
by the application of very stimulating medicines. 
Upon 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, discovered 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 prin- 
ciple to direct their practice, have been sometimes applied with- 
out 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 ac- 
count, to have been the case with respect to stimulating appli- 
cations to the cornea in a diseased state, and can only be ac- 
counted for by a want of knowledge of the structure of the 
parts, which is an argument of uncommon weight in favour 
of the study of anatomy. 
