Artificial Parts, Practical Lives: Modern Histories of Prosthetics

Hard Wear and Soft Tissue: Craft and Commerce in Artificial Eyes

5 Hard Wear and SoftTissue Craft and Commerce in Artificial Eyes Katherine Ott IN 1881, FORTY-THREE-YEAR-OLD Jacob Groff was using an uncooperative ox to haul logs through the countryside of Elkhart County, Indiana . Groff cracked his whip at the unruly animal and the whiplash struck him in the eye. The injury blinded him at once and he felt so sickened he nearly vomited. Groff’s neighbor, John Mann, a nineteen-yearold farmer, began his day as usual, long before dawn, groping around in the dark for his boots. On this particular day, as he stooped over, Mann jammed his eye against the spool holder on the sewing machine.1 Although both of these men regained their vision, at least in the short term, their experiences were typical of people living in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Blunt trauma from blows to the head and face and foreign body penetration were constant hazards. Janitors lost vision while breaking coal for furnaces; stonecutters lost eyes to rock splinters and iron chips flying off the edges of chisels and hammers ; farmers found everything from wheat chaff to tree branches and the hooves of a recalcitrant horse thrust into their eyes. Gun cap shrapnel , cinders from the family fireplace, errant insects, and factory work also posed dangers.2 In the American South and on the prairie frontier of the nineteenth century, a winning strategy in wrestling fights involved biting and eye gouging. Such injuries usually resulted in in- flammation (commonly called ophthalmia), infection, and vision loss (called amblyopia). Before the 1920s, protective eyewear was virtually unknown, except for the occasional carriage, and later, railroad goggles .3 There were only a handful of medicaments: various collyria or 147 eyewashes, atropine, after 1884 cocaine and its anesthetic cousins such as holcaine and nucaine; chloral hydrate was a common sedative.4 Consequently , corneal and retinal injury and deep eye lesions wreaked havoc. Partial and total loss of vision was a fact of life. By the early 1800s, sight itself had assumed a new status in the hierarchy of the senses.5 In Western culture until recent times, all the senses carried equal weight and interest for poets, philosophers, priests, and laypeople. Touch, smell, hearing, taste, and sight contributed to understanding the everyday world of affairs. During the Renaissance, scholars and thinkers began to elevate the sense of sight above other senses. Visual metaphors abounded. In science and medicine, illustrations , drawings, and demonstrations achieved new prestige. By the nineteenth century, the sense of sight was firmly at the top of the hierarchy of the senses. Its dominance was assured by graphic reproduction techniques, such as engraving, lithography, and photography, which 148 KATHERINE OTT FIG. 5.1. Eye injury from foreign body penetration, such as cinders, wood chips, or this millet husk lodged in the cornea, frequently led to vision loss in the nineteenth century. From Julius Sichel, Iconographie ophthalmologique (Paris: J. Bailliere, 1852). made possible the mass production and dissemination of images. People actively engaged with the world added visual discrimination to their portmanteau of important life skills. Scientists plunged into the study of optics, centered on the function of the human eye. The “regime of vision,” as Jonathan Crary has characterized these events, with its kaleidoscopes, stereoscopes, kymographs, compound microscopes, zoetropes, prisms, and ophthalmoscopes, provided the cultural context for understanding expectations about artificial eyes. Injury often resulted in an eye so damaged that physicians believed removal of the eyeball to be the best course of action. For most of the nineteenth century, physicians were of the opinion that, although the injured eye may seem to have recovered fully, eventually the eye would deteriorate and, even more importantly, in the process, the pathology would spread to the other, healthy eye. Known as sympathetic ophthalmia , the process might take from a few hours to many years, but physicians in the late nineteenth century believed it to be inevitable.6 So doctors practiced preventive surgery based on the opinion that it was better to remove the jeopardized eye at the time of injury. This practice was not merely due to the doctor’s desire to collect larger fees for surgery and its attendant procedures. Minute particles embedded somewhere in the eye (in the retina, conjunctiva, choroid, or elsewhere) were hard to locate, even with the aid of the ophthalmoscope (invented in 1851), and consequently went undetected. In one reported case, a man wounded...