Case of Filaria Loa

In the dimly lit consulting rooms of late Victorian medicine, a woman named Miss H arrives with a problem no textbook had fully prepared her physician for: a living worm migrating across the surface of her eye. Douglas Argyll Robertson documents this extraordinary case with the careful precision of a 19th century surgeon, recounting how Miss H, long resident in Old Calabar on West Africa's fever coast, came to harbor Filaria loa beneath her conjunctiva. The parasite's slow traversal across her left eye produces swelling, irritation, and a sensation impossible to ignore. Robertson traces her medical history, debates the likely route of transmission, and meticulously records the surgical extraction that finally frees her from the intruder. Beyond one patient's relief, this slender volume ventures into broader questions: How does European medicine grapple with diseases endemic to regions it colonizes? What does the humble Chrysops fly carry across oceans? The account stands as both clinical record and historical artifact, capturing an era when physicians still narrated their cases in prose that reads like adventure, and when the human body still held secrets waiting to be discovered beneath the surgeon's knife.