LIMITATIONS OF USE OF SILVER NITRATE IN PREVENTION OF OPHTHALMIA NEONATORUM

Abstract

For fifty years the medical profession has accepted Credé's method for the prevention of ophthalmia neonatorum without dispute. Finding that 2 per cent silver nitrate is too irritating to the eyes of the newborn, physicians in general have reduced the strength of silver nitrate to 1 per cent. Ernst Fuchs in his prize essay of 1884 quotes the statistics of Credé to the effect that 10.8 per cent of the babies born at the University Clinic and Polyclinic for Obstetrics and Gynecology and School for Midwives at Leipzig had blennorrhea before the use of silver among 2,897 patients, and that following the use of 2 per cent silver nitrate the incidence of blennorrhea dropped to from 0.1 to 0.2 per cent of a total of 1,160 infants. Institutions interested in the blind have recorded a tremendous drop in the number of admissions to the schools for the blind by reason