53. Ophthalmic care at Joyce Green Hospital

Key phrases/words : Horatio Nelson, HMS Agamemnon, Corsica & Calvi, Lord Hood, the ophthalmic ward at Joyce Green Hospital, cranial immobilisation with sandbags, Mr. Owen - ophthalmic surgeon,

No. 53

This week, 213 years ago, must have been a very uncomfortable week for Horatio Nelson, the famous British naval officer from Norfolk.

In 1793, once Britain had entered the French Revolutionary Wars, Nelson and his ship H.M.S Agamemnon found themselves serving in the Mediterranean off the small northern Corsican town of Calvi.

Earlier on the British navy had been holding this garrison town under siege but on the 12th July 1794 the time had arrived for the British to press home their attack against the enemy.

Nelson and his men reached the local shore in a number of small boats carrying a number of small cannons with them but while some of his men were in the process of setting up a gun battery, with Nelson directing the way that some of these should be pointing, a French shot struck the battery rampart immediately in front of him sending a shower of earth, sand and pebbles into his face, lacerating it and badly damaging his right eye at the same time.

It seems that he made light of the incident in his letters home and to Lord Hood his commander-in-chief however a recently discovered letter has revealed that Nelson had to be carried away from the battery to his tent, suggesting that his injuries were much more disabling than he initially admitted.

The lacerations apparently healed leaving nothing more than a partially-erased eyebrow but his eye never recovered. Modern-day ophthalmologists have tried to reconstruct exactly what caused his subsequent partial-sightedness and the most likely causes suggested have been a severe internal haemorrhage or a detached retina.

What is certain however is that eye itself remained intact and that it looked undamaged. But to the end of his life he could only distinguish light from dark with it and so although not technically blind this eye was virtually useless to him for the remaining 11 years of his life.

Who knows though - perhaps if he had been treated in modern times and in a modern ophthalmic unit such as the one at Joyce Green Hospital perhaps his sight reduction could have been minimised ?

Do you remember the ophthalmic ward at Joyce Green ? I can certainly remember working on that small-but-perfectly formed unit, complete with its own integral operating theatre and headed-up at the time by Mr. Owen, the ophthalmic surgeon.

But I suppose the one thing that sticks in my mind most clearly is the high degree of attention that was paid to the regime of “complete bed-rest” following the type of surgery that was carried out there.

I particularly remember sand-bags being used to maintain patient’s heads absolutely still post-operatively and having to spoon feed patients with semi-liquid food that didn’t require them to masticate.

Oh yes, bedrest meant bedrest and neither were the patients allowed to get out of bed to use a commode until much later on following their surgery. A far cry from contemporary ophthalmic practice these days I suspect ?

Perhaps you have memories of that ward, the staff who worked on it or recollections of some of the patients that were cared for on it ?

In closing, who can say what type of intervention and care Horatio Nelson would have received if he had been admitted to Joyce Green Hospital ophthalmic unit with that particular injury -all those years later ?