They removed a rare spinal tumor by entering through a patient’s eye socket—a route never used before to reach the spine. Remarkably, the patient’s eyesight was not affected.

A story published in LIFE in December 1948 offered vivid depictions of a procedure, pioneered by researchers in Boston, to fit a ball-shaped, pegged ocular implant in the eye socket.

A surgical team at the University of Maryland Medical Center extracted the tumors, which had wrapped around the spinal cord, through the patient’s eye socket.

They would remove the spinal tumor through her left eye socket. If the surgical path was not precise to within a few millimeters, Flores could lose all movement below the neck or suffer a fatal ...