Biomedical Ephemera, or: A Frog for Your Boils

Conjunctivitis gonorrhoica adultorum

Gonorrhea can cause pose a risk to the newborn infant quite easily, especially when it’s contracted during childbirth and not caught until the eye is significantly pustular and weeping, but when gonorrheal infection manages to take hold in the adult eye, it’s often far more damaging, much more quickly than in the infant. The eye can begin producing an excess of clear tears in the morning, by noon have the lachrymation become turbid and milky, and by evening have a steady stream of pus coming from the eye.

As you can see in this illustration, sometimes the entire cornea is broken down into pus by the gonococci, leaving the iris exposed, and precluding possibility of maintaining sight in the infected eye. The unaffected eye is covered by a watch-glass here, and surrounded by an adhesive bandage, to keep any gonococci from spreading over from the infected eye. Though they can easily establish themselves and do massive damage when entrenched in the body (such as in the eyes, or the mucous membranes of the genitalia), gonorrheal bacteria are very delicate and cannot infect across the skin, unless there’a  break or tear present. 

Atlas of External Diseases of the Eye. Richard Greeff, 1914.