Dead Men's Eyes

In Russia, where physicians developed the art of preserving the blood of accident victims in order to build up a reserve or "blood bank" for transfusions,*eye specialists who pioneered in the art of transplanting new corneas to the eyes of the blind have recently established "cornea banks," by removing the corneas of dead people for use in transplanting operations.

In San Francisco last week Dr. Martin Icove Green, 39, surgeon of a busy eye hospital, wishing to emulate the Russian example, asked--with considerable circumspection--for authority to take corneas from the eyes of the dead. Hitherto in the U. S. such corneal transplants have come from living eyes (removed because of tumors, etc.) and coreas for transplanting have usually been available only when a patient whose eye was removed goodheartedly offered it to another sufferer.

The great stumbling block to Dr. Green's plan is that corneas deteriorate if not used within 24 hours of death. The corpses used in medical schools would provide a good source of fresh corneas except that California's curator of corpses, Dr. Guy Stillman Millberry (longtime dean of the University of California College of Dentistry), disposes of no unclaimed body for at least a day--when its corneas are no longer fit for transplanting.

Another impediment is the law of property in corpses. They belong to the next of kin or friendship. When Dr. Green applied to San Francisco's Health Commissioner Jacob Casson Geiger and Coroner Thomas Byers Woods Leland for cooperation, they reminded him that peeling a cornea from a body was precisely like performing an autopsy: it requires written permission of the corpse's owners.

*Philadelphia's General Hospital and Chicago's Cook County Hospital maintain free blood banks, replenished by relatives and friends of patients who received transfusions. Manhattan's Bellevue and Brooklyn's Kings County hospitals start similar free banks next week.

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