Experimental Corneal Ulcers Experimental Corneal Ulcers

DURING recent years we have been working in Edinburgh on experimental ulcers and infections of the cornea of various types. This work started at the beginning of 1940 with the investigation of experimental mustard gas lesions on the eye and their treatment. In the course of this work it was found that secondary infection played an important part in determining the severity of the lesions produced by mustard gas; this not onlv affected the immediate reaction (corneal oedema and conjunctivitis) observed during the first week following contamination, but also the liability of contaminated eyes to develop delayed "vascularised keratitis " (secondary oedema with vascularization) starting about a week to ten days after the application of the gas. It was found that local treatment with chemotherapeutic agents decreased the severity of the primary reaction (which lasts for about -a week following contamination), and also the liability of the eyes to develop delayed " vascularized keratitis " in rabbits. These experiments suggested that chemotherapeutic agents might be of value in the treatment of mustard gas lesions of the human eye and the treatment with sodium sulphacetamide (albucid soluble) is, to some extent, based on this, work. It became obvious, however, that much further work was necessary on the treatment of ocular infections, and it was of especial interest to determine how infections produced by different types of organisms could be influenced by treatment with chemotherapeutic agents and also with antiseptics. There is much previous work on the production of experimental corneal infections with various organisms and this will be referred to later. In the case of B. pyocyaneus methods for the production of ocular lesions suitable for experimental investigation have been accurately described, but no such methods appear to be available for the study of infections produced by organisms 'like the pneumococcus, staphylococcus aureus and streptococcus haemolyticus, and suitable techniques had to be devised. As an extension of this work we have also studied experimental tuberculous lesions of the cornea. As will be seen such lesions have been previously described, but we have further studied them in