Ophthalmic medicine in England in the first half of the eighteenth century was at low level. Quacks were in their heyday; Read, Grant, Taylor and other mountebanks flourished, but it was the final season of their harvesting. Surgeons like Cheselden, Sharp, Ware and others, strengthened by Daviel's success in the complete removal of cataract, began to arouse the interest of serious, honorable members of the medical profession in a scientific investigation and comprehensive understanding of the conditions affecting the eyes which they had for so long committed to the far from tender ministrations of irregular practitioners who were spoken of as "oculists" and regarded with the greatest scorn and contempt by the members of the regular medical profession. All sorts of nostrums were exploited, and society tolerated quackery from force of the example set by certain eminent physicians of the day who vended medicines the composition of which they