In historical novels, TV shows and movies, a character with one eye (usually a badass fighter or sage) seems to be a pretty standard trope. But without modern medicine, would people really be able to regularly survive such an injury? Wouldn't it be a huge wound? Given how close the back of the eye is the front of the frontal lobe, would brain damage be a common side effect of eye trauma? Wouldn't infection have a really easy time spreading to the brain from the eye socket? Did you just stick a wad of cloth in the hole and hope?
I'm not really looking for a medical answer, and I am aware that movies, TV and books can and do do include things that aren't historically accurate. But I just can't image what recourse people would have had, before hospitals, for this kind of injury.
/r/AskHistorians, can you help?
A wound that requires an eyepatch is not necessarily a wound that removes an eye.
Fairly minor ocular maladies like basic corneal abrasions (scratches on the surface of the eye) would have been completely untreatable by the medicine of the time, and could easily cause blindness or disfigurement without posing any serious risk to life.
Basically there are a lot of ways a medieval person could wind up with "one eye" without physically "losing" an eye.
As /u/IamSeth points out, there are many minor injuries that would cost eyesight, but there also are lots of more severe injuries that could cause complete loss of function without eye removal, such as penetrating injuries due to flying debris. Wooden ships hit by cannonball would have lots of splinters flying; chips can fly off metalworking activities. Even fistfights can result in closed eye injuries. These tend to support the trope that the injured was not living a quiet life.
As for loss of eyeball, people have survived far worse trauma (e.g. Phineas Gage's penetrating head injury).
Complete loss of eye is not always as hazardous as you might think. There are other bodily injuries (e.g. abdominal) that were historically much more difficult to treat. Depending on the injury, the patient might retain the capsule of the eye socket, or even a portion of the sclera both of which function as barriers to infection. It's not a hole into the brain. The tissues of your eye are already exposed to the elements and do not regularly become infected.