Conjunctivitis or "red Eye"
When photographed with a flash, the iris constricts but not fast enough to avoid the red-eye effect. This represents reflection of light from the back of the eye, and is closely related to the term red reflex, used by ophthalmologists and optometrists in describing appearances on fundal examination.
When used as a descriptive term in medicine, the meaning of red eye is quite different, and indicates that the bulbar conjunctiva is reddened due to dilatation of superficial blood vessels. Leaving aside rarities, it indicates surface infection (conjunctivitis), intraocular inflammation (e.g., iridocyclitis) or high intraocular pressure (acute glaucoma or occasionally severe, untreated chronic glaucoma). This use of "red eye" implies disease. The term is therefore not used in medicine for ocular albinism, in which the eye is otherwise healthy despite an obviously red pupil and a translucent pinkish iris due to reflected light from the fundus. "Red eye" is used more loosely in veterinary practice, where investigation of eye diseases can be difficult, but even so albinotic breeds>are easily recognised and are usually described as having "pink eye" rather than "red eye".
Read more about this topic: Iris (anatomy)
Famous quotes containing the words red and/or eye:
“Red river, red river,
Slow flow heat is silence
No will is still as a river
Still.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“If you meet a sectary, or a hostile partisan, never recognize the dividing lines; but meet on what common ground remains,—if only that the sun shines, and the rain rains for both; the area will widen very fast, and ere you know it the boundary mountains, on which the eye had fastened, have melted into air.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)