Would any medical practitioner, called to the house of a wealthy man to examine his ailing child, purposely defer its physical examination until after this eye-test had been applied?
Many of the children were suffering from various ailments at the time this test was made. Some had rickets, some typhoid fever, some whooping-cough, pleurisy, pneumonia or heart disease. Some of them were already near their end; in one case we are told that the "tests were applied within eight days of death"; upon another emaciated infant, the test was "applied three days before death." Infancy earned no immunity from experimentation, for the eye-test was said to have been applied "to seventeen infants, ranging in age from four weeks to five months." In this group of cases, one infant was tested within the last twenty-four hours of its pitiful and painful existence.
What were the possible consequences of these tests upon the sight of the orphans and foundlings of St. Vincent's Home? The experimenters frankly confess that at the outset they did not know.
"Before beginning application of the conjunctival test, WE HAD NO KNOWLEDGE OF ANY SERIOUS RESULTS FROM ITS USE…. It has the great disadvantage of producing a decidedly uncomfortable lesion, and it is not infrequently followed by serious inflammations of the eye, which not only produce great physical discomfort and require weeks of active tratment, BUT WHICH MAY PERMANENTLY AFFECT THE VISION, AND EVEN LEAD TO ITS COMPLETE DESTRUCTION…. W ehave had a number of verbal reports of eye complications, some of them relating to very serious conditions; and we are sure they are much commoner than the references we have communicated would indicate…. In fact we are strongly of the opinion that any diagnostic procedure which will so frequently result in serious lesions of the eye has no justification in medicine…."
The conclusions concernng the occasionally disastrous consequences of this eye-test were shortly confirmed by other experimenters. During the following year, two Massachusetts physicians reported a study made in "the out-patient clinic of the Carney Hospital and the Massachusetts Chartiable Eye and Ear Infirmary," and they add: "We are most indebted to the staff of the latter institution for allowing us to make use of their material…. We have discarded the conjunctival test, AS BEING OCCASIONALLY PRODUCTIVE OF DISASTROUS RESULTS."
In May, 1909, two Baltimore physicians reported their trials with two forms of the tuberculin tests, "the result of over a year of experience with patients coming to the Phipps Dispensary of the Johns Hopkins Hospital." A year later they make an additional report.
"In May, 1909, we reported the results of the conjunctival and cutaneous test in 500 patients. The present report deals with 1,000 additional patients to whom these tests were administered, and who formed THE UNSELECTED MATERIAL OF AN AMBULANT CLINIC, the Phipps Dispensary of the Johns Hopkins Hospital."
They, too, suggest the necessity for caution in making this experiment. If a drop of the tuberculin, first in one eye and then in the other, produced no reaction,
"we refrained from further instillations, fearing the possible intensity of a reaction consequent upon a second instillation of tuberculin into an eye. Our fear is based on evidence, gathered accidentally, that a second instillation may give a positive and even a severe reaction in a case in which a similar test gave a negative result.
In January, 1909, one of the professors connected with the College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York, published a "Report upon one thousand Tuberculin tests in young children." He says: