Casey Wood

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF OPHTHALMOLOGY Published

Monthly

by the Ophthalmic

Publishing

Company

EDITORIAL STAFF DERRICK VAIL, Editor-in-Chief

C. S. O'BRIEN

837 Carew Tower, Cincinnati

The State University of Iowa, College of Medicine, Iowa City

EDWARD JACKSON, Consulting Editor

Republic Building, Denver

ALGERNON B. REESE

530 Metropolitan Building, Denver

M. URIBE TRONCOSO

640 S. Kingshighway, Saint Louis

F. E. WOODRUFF

The Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota

ALAN C. WOODS

WILLIAM H. CRISP, Consulting Editor

73 East Seventy-first Street, New York

LAWRENCE T. POST, Consulting Editor

500 West End Avenue, New York

WILLIAM L. BENEDICT

824 Metropolitan Building, Saint Louis

GRADY E. CLAY

Wilmer Ophthalmological more

Medical Arts Building, Atlanta

FREDERICK C. CORDES

Institute, Balti-

GEORGE A. FILMER

384 Post Street, San Francisco

Assistant Editor Abstract Department 1114 Republic Building, Denver EMMA S. Buss, Manuscript Editor 2500 Kemper Lane, Cincinnatti

HARRY S. GRADLE

58 East Washington Street, Chicago

RALPH H. MILLER

803 Carew Tower, Cincinnati

Directors: LAWRENCE T. POST, President, WILLIAM L. BENEDICT, Vice-President, DONALD J. LYLE, Secretary and Treasurer, EDWARD JACKSON, WILLIAM H. CRISP, HARRY S. GRADLE.

Address original papers, other scientific communications including correspondence, also books for review and reports of society proceedings to Dr. Derrick Vail, 837Carexu Tower, Cincinnati. Exchange copies of medical journals should be sent to Dr. William H. Crisp, 530 Metro­ politan Building, Denver. Subscriptions, applications for single copies, notices of change of address, and communica­ tions with reference to advertising should be addressed to the Manager of Subscriptions and Advertising, 837 Carew Tower, Cincinnati. Copy of advertisements must be sent to the manager by the fifteenth of the month preceding its appearance. Author's proofs should be corrected and returned within forty-eight hours to the Manuscript Editor, Miss Emma S. Buss, 2500 Kemper Lane, Cincinnati. Twenty-five reprints on each article will be supplied to the author without charge. Additional reprints may be obtained from the printer, the George Banta Publishing Company, 450-458 Ahnaip Street, Menasha, Wisconsin, if ordered at the time proofs are returned. But reprints to contain colored plates must be ordered when the article is accepted. At that time, while he was not engaged in private practice, he was far from hav­ ing relinquished professional responsi­ bilities. A s a Major in the Medical R e ­ serve Corps of the United States A r m y he h a d already examined four or five hundred aviation candidates, and he was then engaged in the preparation of a Not so very many of those who read paper on these examinations. A few these pages knew Casey W o o d in his months later he was organizing the oph­ prime. It is now nearly a quarter of a thalmic service in the cantonment hospital century since he wrote to a friend on the at Chillicothe, Ohio. western coast : " I have retired from prac­ In the year 1917 ( a t the age of sixtytice and now perhaps can give my ener­ one years) he was busy with the negoti­ gies to the work that I like to do and not ations which led to merger into one to that which in the past I have felt "American Journal of Ophthalmology" obliged to d o . " of the old competitive group of AmeriCASEY W O O D "Know'st thou not at the fall of the leaf H o w the soul feels like a dried sheaf Bound up at length for harvesting, And how death seems a comely thing In Autumn at the fall of the leaf?" —Rossctti

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EDITORIALS

can eye periodicals : The Annals of Oph­ thalmology, The Ophthalmic Record, Ophthalmology, The Ophthalmic Year Book, and Ophthalmic Literature. Wood's contribution to this combination was The Ophthalmic Record, which he had edited for twenty-one years after taking it over from G. C. Savage. At first, Casey Wood was expected to assume the post of managing editor for the new journal. One of his letters ex­ pressed the wish that the former editor of one of the merging publications could be near Chicago for purposes of col­ laboration. But Wood acknowledges the reasons against this by saying: "/ would not exchange the delights of the Pacific Coast for fifty Chicagos." His successive appointments to one duty after another in the United States Army led to constant postponement of his participation in the onerous duties of editing the new American Journal of Ophthalmology, so that this responsibility remained in the hands of Edward Jack­ son. In the Army, Wood shortly undertook duties in connection with the "remaking of the returned soldier—reconstruction and re-education." Later he was trans­ ferred to the Division of the Medical His­ tory of the War, of which he was for some time executive officer. Another Army letter was signed as, "Secretary, Board of Publishers." The war delayed his formal retirement from the ranks of active ophthalmolo­ gists until the beginning of 1920, when the Chicago Ophthalmological Society gave a farewell reception and banquet in his honor. At this celebration, the scope of his many activities was sufficiently in­ dicated by the following titles of re­ sponses to toasts : "Dr. Wood as the oph­ thalmologist," by Dr. Lucien Howe, Buf­ falo; "Dr. Wood as writer and editor,"

by Fielding H. Garrison, Lieut.-Col., M.C., U. S. Army; "Dr. Wood as pro­ fessor of ophthalmology," by Harold Gifford, Omaha; "Dr. Wood as military surgeon," by Dr. Walter R. Parker, De­ troit; "Dr. Wood as ornithologist and comparative anatomist," by Prof. Henry B. Ward of the University of Illinois." He left for his new home in Palo Alto, California, on January twentieth. His death in that state at the end of last January ended a long period of retire­ ment which to many of his friends must have seemed almost as strenuous as his years of busy practice in Chicago. The monumental "Encyclopedia of oph­ thalmology" he had begun in 1913, having already edited the two-volume "System of ophthalmic therapeutics" and the twovolume "System of ophthalmic opera­ tions." The Encyclopedia, running into eighteen large volumes, was not com­ pleted until 1921. It is the Encyclopedia, with its 14,122 large pages of printed matter, which most characteristically displays the scope of his personality and literary abilities. It enlisted the services of sixty-nine col­ laborators from all parts of the United States. (Of these, eight were deceased before the date of publication of the last volume.) Incorporated in it are several considerable treatises on individual oph­ thalmic topics. A great deal of the En­ cyclopedia was written by Wood himself in his own name, and much more of it was added or rewritten by him after the efforts of individual collaborators had proved inadequate or unsatisfactory from the editor's point of view. The compilation of the Encyclopedia was no easy task even for one who like Casey Wood enjoyed a broad acquaint­ ance with the literature of ophthalmology in his own and several other languages. His correspondence acknowledges many

EDITORIALS

disappointments and vexations in deal­ ing with those who had undertaken to collaborate. In March, 1919, he writes from Stan­ ford University : "I have been doing little else in the last six weeks but write and edit volume XIV of the Encyclopedia. It has been a grinding task because certain contributed manuscript had to be prac­ tically rewritten or, what is often worse, reconstructed for the printer." May, 1919: "I found that four of the men I had relied upon to write important and time-consuming sections had defaulted . . . and I should have to tackle these tasks myself." A little later we read : "I shall have to take in hand 's promised section of the Encyclopedia and write most of it myself. Here after nearly seven months of urging and begging I find that he has barely begun the important section on But retirement had its great compensa­ tions. Especially included in "the work that I like to do" was the study of the eyes of birds. "The fundus oculi of birds," a monograph embellished by the colored drawings of a capable artist, had appeared in 1917. In May, 1920, after "working like a galley slave on the final volume of the Encyclopedia," he and Harold Gifford "propose (with our wives) to join Beebe in his New York Zoological Soci­ ety tropical station to do a few months work on comparative biology." Actually, he spent two winters in British Guiana with William Beebe. Several years were spent in India and Ceylon, and there was a journey to Oceania. In 1931 there came a 643-page "In­ troduction to the literature on vertebrate zoology." To the McGill Library at Mont­ real he presented what his friend and collaborator Thomas Hall Shastid de­

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scribes as the "largest selection of books and articles on birds that exists in the world." Later, when perhaps more sedentary occupation became desirable, Casey Wood devoted himself to the translation and republication of ancient treatises on the eye. A translation of Benevenutus Grassus' "De Oculis" (A.D. 1474), published in 1930, was followed by translation of the "Tadhkirat of Ali ibn Isa of Baghdad, memorandum book of a tenth-century oculist." A number of years were spent in Italy, although with occasional excur­ sions to the Californian home. In No­ vember, 1936, he writes : "We had a great and glorious celebration of our '50th' in Pasadena. . . . We fly to N.Y. in a few days to catch the Vulcania for Na­ ples. You see, the cacoethes scribendi still holds me, and I am even now engaged in collecting material for my next—surely my last—book, another medieval transla­ tion the chief item for which is in the X^atican Library. If I live that long I hope to publish the affair by the end of 1937 or beginning of 1938." Although born in Canada of United States parents, and educated in Canada until he spent several years of medical postgraduate study chiefly in England but partly in other countries of Europe, Casey Wood acquired during his resi­ dence in Rome a particular fondness for the Fascist government of Italy, and he circulated to many of his friends strange words of condemnation of the British Empire and more surprising words in praise of the country which was then en­ gaged in bombing groups of Ethiopians into gory masses which were described by Count Ciano as suggesting the ap­ pearance of red roses bursting into bloom.* * It must be remembered that more responsi­ ble European powers have indulged in similar

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EDITORIALS

The generation that knew Casey Wood remembers him as an alert, incisive, and tremendously active personality, a bril­ liant ophthalmologist, a clever surgeon, an accomplished linguist, and a prolific and facile writer. The Encyclopedia could hardly be de­ scribed as a model of conciseness or compression. Casey Wood loved to as­ semble a great abundance of clippings from the periodical literature, and then to collate and combine them, by much use of scissors and paste and blue pencil. This led to frequent repetition and ex­ travagant use of space, and even at times to a lack of finality where finality ought to have been possible. Yet, as a whole, this enormous work, in spite of more recent developments in the specialty, is prob­ ably still the most useful reference pub­ lication on ophthalmology in any lan­ guage. Shastid writes of him: "No one who did not know Dr. Casey Wood person­ ally can have much idea of his greatness. As a diagnostician he was swiftness and accuracy combined. As an operator, a great artist. As a linguist unexcelled, es­ pecially in medieval Arabic. As a man, clean, upright, a brother to his confrères and to all mankind." W. H. Crisp. ANIMAL EXPERIMENTATION IN OPHTHALMOLOGY* Ophthalmology owes much, directly and indirectly, to animal experimentation, and when properly conducted it is often a fertile source of information. When the ocular organism itself is chosen as the medium of research it is hardly necessary barbaric sport, although among none of them perhaps has the deed been commemorated so sadistically. * The Journal takes pleasure in reprinting the last long editorial written by Dr. Casey A. Wood (1919, v. 2, p. 832).

to point out that the feral or domesticated eyes chosen for the purpose should resem­ ble as closely as possible those of man if one is to draw definite conclusions from such investigations. Even a superficial student of the biol­ ogy and histopathology of the visual ap­ paratus in the so-called lower animals will soon be convinced that the manifest differ­ ences between the tissues and their re­ actions to morbid influences in the eyes of man, and of such creatures as the dog, mouse, rat, guinea pig, rabbit, frog, etc., make it highly improbable that a certain class of laboratory experiments and investigations can do more than sug­ gest the possibility (in some instances the probability) that like conditions pre­ vail in both. Conclusions drawn from this form of experiment are certainly open to serious doubt so far as their applica­ tion to human experience is concerned. Indeed the employment for research pur­ poses of animal eyes below the simian orders (and the more closely they ap­ proach the tissues of the higher apes the better) can have but little value for scien­ tific conclusions in human pathology. Altho years of valuable time and the concentrated energies of hundreds of ob­ servers have been expended during the past half century in attempts to apply lower animal evidence in human ophthal­ mology, most of it has probably been wasted. The chief workshop for promiscuous production of this sort has for several decades past been Germany. We all know how often the report of an "Arbeit" pro­ posed by a teacher in some klinik or laboratory, and carried out by indefati­ gable students with an enthusiasm worthy of a better cause, has filled dreary pages of "Graefe's Archiv" or some other Teu­ tonic journal. In the course of time, absence of re­ sponsibility involved in this kind of re-