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Tel Aviv. 12. 12. 37
I am now dictating what I should have written by hand yesterday. But too many visitors arrived and a batch of post that had to be attended to right away.
The oculist I am consulting here is a young Viennese, a Dr. Much. He was assistant in Kiel to Heine, who invented contact lenses, and subsequently he was assistant in the
ophthalmic hospital in Lucerne. There he studied the effect of amyl nitrite on diseases of the back of the eye, and he supervised and treated eight such cases of which he later wrote up accounts. I took his publications on the subject to my very cautious G.P., Dr. Meyer-Brodnitz, and after a consultation with him I decided to try inhaling doses of amyl nitrite daily. You know, I am sure, that amyl nitrite causes an expansion of the arteries and accelerates the flow of blood; it thus enables the eye to reduce and indeed overcome any disturbing scotomata through the improvement in the alimentation of the retina. The cases Much treated showed an astonishing improvement in vision; in some cases, indeed, the eye was restored to complete normality. The majority of his patients were only a little younger than I. A few, indeed, were older and all were kept under supervision for a considerable period, ranging from six to eighteen months, and in not one single case was there any subsequent deterioration in the eye nor did the effect of the treatment wear off. The odd thing is that once again my medical intuition has been proved right; for six years I have been telling everyone that I did not need an oculist but a physiologist, who would be able to improve the alimentation of the area behind the eye without the increase in blood pressure causing the bursting of new blood vessels on the surface. If the Gerson treatment was a first successful step in this direction, it now seems to me that this use of amyl nitrite is a second step whose effect is more rapidly apparent. On the average the results could be observed after the first ten days a