The Drooling Eye

In a Negro ward of Atlanta's Grady Memorial Hospital, a grizzled man sat up in bed, waiting to cry. If only he could weep, he might see again. David Dougherty, 62, had lost his sight almost completely as the aftermath of a rare disease,* which destroys the lacrimal glands producing the watery fluid that lubricates the eyeballs. For two days Dougherty sat in bed with increasing impatience. The doctor had told him he could expect to see again soon after the operation. Still no tears came. Then one noon Dougherty heard a lunch cart rattling down the corridor. As it stopped at the door, he smelled the food. His mouth watered--and so did his right eye. Dougherty began to see again.

What had happened was no coincidence but just what the doctor had planned. Finding that conventional (largely wait-and-see) treatment for a year and a half did nothing to restore Dougherty's sight, Resident Surgeon Joseph Lamar Mays, 33, decided on a rare and ingenious operation developed in Russia and China, seldom done previously in the U.S. The idea: to take one of Dougherty's salivary glands (there are three on each side) and reroute it so that the saliva would flow into the right eye socket and restore his vision. In a delicate, 2 1/2-hour operation, Surgeon Mays cut into Dougherty's right cheek, freed the parotid salivary duct almost back to the ear, cut it free from the inside of the mouth with a bit of mucous membrane attached, then led it to the eye's outer corner.

Perhaps because the disturbed tissues were swollen, the duct at first carried no saliva. But when Dougherty heard and smelled the lunch wagon, the flow was copious. Says Dougherty, a former railroad freight handler who has been unable to work for five years: "My eye watered so much I had to put a towel on my lap. But when the watering stopped, I could see the food." From having been able to distinguish only light from dark, Dougherty developed 20/200 vision--enough for him to travel alone to the hospital last week for a checkup. His vision is expected to improve for six months, perhaps to 20/30. Meanwhile, he will have the same operation on his left eye. The excessive drooling in the right eye, triggered by food, has already let up to the point where it is no longer uncomfortable.

* The less doctors know about a disease, the longer the name they give it. Knowing nothing about the cause or cure of Dougherty's affliction (marked by ulceration of the eyes and mouth and atrophy of various glands), they have called it ectodermosis erosiva pluriorificialis.

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