Department of Pathology and Cell Biology, Morsani College of Medicine, University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida, USA; Department of Ophthalmology, Morsani College of Medicine, University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida, USA.
Department of Ophthalmology, Morsani College of Medicine, University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida, USA.
Surv Ophthalmol. 2018 Mar-Apr;63(2):275-280. doi: 10.1016/j.survophthal.2017.10.004. Epub 2017 Oct 19.
In the early 1820s, a Yorkshire boarding school was devastated by an outbreak of blinding ophthalmia. The cause of the epidemic was-in all likelihood-trachoma, then known as Egyptian ophthalmia. The headmaster of the Yorkshire school, William Shaw, was sued for gross negligence by 2 families whose sons went blind during the outbreak. The epidemic and trial would play a role in creating one of the literature's most notorious fictional characters. Eighteen years after the trial, Charles Dickens modeled the vile schoolmaster Wackford Squeers in Nicholas Nickleby after Shaw, whose reputation and career would later be ruined by his thinly disguised portrayal in the novel. The original boarding school epidemic took place while London's first eye hospital was moving to Lower Moorfields, an institution that 17 years earlier was established primarily to cope with Egyptian ophthalmia. We explore trachoma's wide-ranging impact on pre-Victorian England, from inspiring an enduring literary villain to the creation of a renowned eye hospital.
19 世纪 20 年代初，约克郡的一所寄宿学校爆发了一场致盲性眼炎。此次疫情的病因很可能是沙眼，当时它被称为埃及眼炎。约克郡学校的校长威廉·肖因在疫情爆发期间有两名失明学生的家长对其提起了严重疏忽的诉讼。这场疫情和审判在塑造文学界最臭名昭著的虚构人物之一方面发挥了作用。审判 18 年后，查尔斯·狄更斯在《尼古拉斯·尼克贝》中以肖为原型塑造了卑鄙的学监威克菲尔·斯克里尔，肖的声誉和事业后来因小说中对他的巧妙刻画而毁于一旦。最初的寄宿学校疫情发生时，伦敦第一家眼科医院正在迁往下摩尔菲尔德，该医院 17 年前成立，主要是为了应对埃及眼炎。我们探讨了沙眼对维多利亚时代前的英国产生的广泛影响，从激发一个经久不衰的文学恶棍到创建一家著名的眼科医院。
