Polite Dissent

Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane #88 “Through a Murderer’s Eyes” or “The Girl with the Haunted Eyes”
Leo Dorfman, writer
Irv Novick, penciler

Shortly after finishing an article about seeing-eye dogs, Lois Lane is shot at by a thug from crime boss Nero Cary’s gang. It seems that Lois is one of the star witnesses at Cary’s trial and they don’t want her to testify. Lois is not directly hit by the bullet, but it does graze her eyes. She begins to have difficulty seeing so she goes to local oculist Dr. Wade. While in his office, her eyesight goes from bad to worse. He diagnoses her with blindness due to corneal injury, and tells her it might get better in a few days because the rest of the eyes are undamaged.

Lois doesn’t want anyone to know she’s blind, so she and her sister Lucy try to hide the fact from Perry White and Superman, but Superman figures out the ruse. Later, he saves her from an attack by more of Cary’s thugs. Lois returns to Dr. Wade who tells her that her corneal damage is so bad that she’ll never see again! Her only hope to regain her vision is a corneal transplant. While there are no donors available in Metropolis, there is one conveniently available in Gotham City. Superman retrieves the cadaver and the operation is performed. The catch: the corneas come from an executed murderer.

When the bandages come off a few days later, Lois’s eyesight is perfect. But then she starts seeing images of people who aren’t there — people who are screaming in terror. Dr. Wade reassures her that it’s common for people in her situation to hallucinate, and puts on a nightly sedative. After continuing to experience hallucinations, Lois eventually realizes that she’s seeing images of the people murdered by the donor.

As she is called as a witness at Cary’s trial, the defense attorney objects because “Miss Lane has been subject to hallucinations and violent outbursts in public! She could break down at any tine!” Right on cue, Lois begins to see another screaming face. This time, with help from Superman, Lois reveals that the hallucinations were all a ploy by Cary to make her believe she was insane. The eye doctor she saw was not Dr. Wade, but instead an imposter. Lois never received corneal transplants because she was never really blind to begin with. During her “operation”, Wade put special contacts on Lois’s eyes that would show an image when bathed in infra-red light. One of Cary’s cronies would follow her around with an infra-red flashlight and another would slip into her apartment while she was sedated at night and change contacts. Luckily Lois discovered it was all a hoax when she realized she was seeing the faces of people who were shot in the back. Realizing he has been caught red-handed, Nero Cary throws himself on the mercy of the court.

This story contains a tremendous amount of bad medicine, but most of it can be blamed on the fake Dr. Wade. However, I’m surprised that an experienced investigative journalist like Lois (or Clark) didn’t realize the doctor was a fake because:
1. I’m not sure what instrument Dr. Wade was using, but it sure wasn’t an ophthalmoscope.
2. Lois became entirely blind during her appointment with him
3. Instead of performing surgery, he placed contact lenses on her. Come on, you can’t tell me that someone wouldn’t realize that 1) no surgery had been performed on their body, and 2) they had contacts on. Even if Lois didn’t notice, Superman should have.
4. Corneal transplants don’t heal in 2-3 days and most post-transplant patients still require corrective lenses.
4. Hallucinations are never normal.
5. Real doctors don’t prescribe sedatives for hallucinations, and if they did, they wouldn’t hand them out in bottles from the office.

Other thoughts and random facts:

• If Cary is trying to kill Lois, why not just kill her at night when she’s sedated? One of his henchmen is already in her apartment anyway.
• How did Lois get bumped to the top of the transplant list so quickly? And what happened to the actual corneas, did they go to waste?
• Why did Superman fly an entire corpse from Gotham City to Metropolis, when only the corneas were needed? (And why fly a cadaver on a gurney?)
• Infra-red does not work that way.
• Even if Lois’s medical history were common knowledge (which it shouldn’t be), the defense attorney should have revealed her hallucinations while trying to discredit her testimony on the stand, not launch an objection beforehand.
• The story did play fair with clues. Whenever Lois had a hallucination, there was someone nearby with an infra-red flashlight. The newspaper headline in the Daily Bugle morgue read “shot from behind.”
• Corneal transplants were one of the first successful transplant operations. First performed successfully in 1905, they were common practice by 1950.
• Finally, you gotta love the Scooby-Doo style reveal at the end, when they pull the fake face of the imposter doctor.