The Chevalier Taylor and his strabismus operation.

IN several of his many writings Taylor maintained that he could cure squint without risk by a prompt and almost painless operation. As far as has been known up to now, he himself never described the theoretical basis and the method of his operation. We have had information only from his contemporaries, who described his mode of procedure. At Rouen, Lecat (1743) saw him cutting off a strip of conjunctiva, pretending to cure a strabismus. In 1750 at Rostock, Eschenbach (1752) heard a lecture by Taylor who said that he could cut through one of the rectus muscles, and in 1751 at Copenhagen, Heuermann (1756) understood that his method was to cut through the tendon of the superior oblique. Neither at Rostock nor at Copenhagen did Taylor actually perform the operation. The question of Taylor's operation has been thoroughly discussed by many medical historians, including Antonelli (1902), Hirschberg (1912), and Coats (1915). The general assumption seems to support the opinion of Coats, who summarizes as follows: On the whole the impression conveyed is that he recognized clearly that squint was a disturbance of muscle equilibrium; that he conceived the idea that it might be cured by dividing a muscleand in this conception apparently he is really entitled to the credit of priority; that either with, or very much more probably without, having made the attempt, he became convinced that the operation was impracticable; that in order not to lose his dishonest emoluments he devised the fraudulent procedure described by Lecat; that for the hoodwinking of intelligent onlookers or critics he further invented two stories-first, that he divided a nervous filament; second, that his stitch served to fix the globe while he divided the muscle. Having visited Rostock and Copenhagen, Taylor went to Stockholm where he spent the last four months of the year 1751. There he gave demonstrations of his instruments and operations, and also a series of lectures on the eye and its diseases, as apparently he had done in other places. In the library of Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, is preserved an interesting manuscript (Ms. 158 :1:11) consisting of annotations made during Taylor's lectures by the prominent Swedish physician Abraham Back. On the first lea-f there are some very surprising notes on squint. In children the squint is caused by a bad habit and must be treated with a special "machine" of Taylor's own design. "But in grown-up people who squint since childhood, one ought to cut through a larger