OPHTHALMIA. 
259 
ward, and sometimes on the very day of the attack, the cham¬ 
ber becomes obscured by a dingy white or amber colored 
deposit seen floating within it, through which the pupil is 
hardly discernible, contracted as it is to the breadth of a 
broad line, and looking more like the black eye of a garden 
bean than the ovoid aperture it was before. Supervening upon 
this we, in some cases, have obscuration of the cornea taking 
place, arising from an extension of the conjunctival inflamma¬ 
tion over it, and this, in very severe cases, is so intense that the 
vessels carrying red blood are perceptible upon its surface, 
shooting from all sides of the circumference into a sort of cir- 
culus vasculosus, from which others proceed after the manner 
of radii toward a common centre. The obscuration of the 
cornea, though it may still leave the lymph effused into the 
chamber of the eye visible, precludes us from distinguishing 
the pupil and the iris and it is not until the inflammation has 
abated that we again regain a view of those parts, and this con¬ 
stitutes the first or inflammatory stage of ophthalmia, which 
generally lasts from three to ten days or longer, according to the 
intensity of the inflammation, differing only in different stages. 
In the 3d or 4th stage we see through the anterior chamber the 
iris, murky and darkened, altered in color and lustreless, with 
the pupil contracted as much as ever but not evincing that 
sensitiveness to light which it did in the inflammatory stage. 
Within the chamber and gravitating toward the bottom of 
it are to be discerned flakes or flocculi of whitish or yellowish 
lymph, effusions, as we suppose, from the vessels which secrete 
the aqueous humor. There is no longer the overflow of tears 
on the face or the conjunctival inflammation, showing clearly 
that the inflammatory stage is passed, leaving only its conse¬ 
quences behind and the eye appears to recover from day to day 
until there is a relapse again. Relapses are looked for as a 
matter of course, and yet there are cases where there has been 
but one attack and that one not of a destructive nature. 
The changes that the structure of the diseased eye under¬ 
goes are with few exceptions the result of the excessive inflam- 
