Eye Care Blog

A shortsighted young woman, to take the opposite of this case, had a passion for mathematics and anatomy and excelled in those subjects. She learned to use the ophthalmoscope as easily as the farsighted girl had learned Latin. Almost immediately she saw the optic nerve and noted that the center was whiter than the periphery. She saw the light-colored lines, the arteries; and the darker ones, the veins; and she saw the light streaks on the blood vessels. Some specialists never become able to do this, and no one could do it without normal vision. Her vision, therefore, must have been temporarily normal when she did it. Her vision for figures, although not normal, was better than for letters.

In both these cases the ability to learn and the ability to see went hand in hand with interest. One could read a photographic reduction of the Bible and recite verbatim what she had read, and could see the moons of Jupiter and draw a diagram of them afterwards, because she was interested in these things; but she could not see the interior of the eye, nor could she see figures even half as well as she saw letters, because these things bored her. But when it was suggested to her that it would be a good joke to surprise her teachers, who were always reproaching her for her backwardness in mathematics, by making a high mark in a coming examination, her interest in the subject awakened and she contrived to learn enough to get a mark of 78. In the other’s case, letters were antagonistic. She was not interested in most of the subjects with which they dealt, and therefore she was backward in those subjects and had become habitually myopic. But when she was asked to look at objects which aroused an intense interest, her vision became normal.

When one is not interested, in short, one’s mind is not under control, and without mental control one can neither learn nor see. Not only the memory but all other mental faculties are improved when the eyesight becomes normal. It is a common experience with people cured of defective sight to find that their ability to do their work has improved.

A bookkeeper nearly seventy years of age who had worn glasses for forty years found that after he had gained normal sight without glasses he could work more rapidly and accurately and with less fatigue than ever in his life before. During busy seasons, or when short of help, he worked for some weeks at a time from 7 A.M. until i i P.M., and he insisted that he felt less tired at night after he was through than he did in the morning when he started. Previously, although he had done more work than any other man in the office, it always tired him very much. He also noticed an improvement in his temper. Having been so long in the office, and knowing so much more about the business than his fellow employees, he was frequently appealed to for advice. These interruptions, before his sight became normal, were very annoying to him and often made him lose his temper. Afterwards, however, they caused him no irritation whatever.

In another case, symptoms of insanity were relieved when the vision became normal. A physician who had already been seen by many nerve and eye specialists came to me,_ not because he had any faith in my methods but because nothing else seemed to be left for him to do. He brought with him quite a collection of glasses prescribed by different men, and no two of them were alike. He told me that he had worn glasses for many months at a time without benefit, and then he had left them off and had been apparently no worse. Outdoor life had also failed to help him. On the advice of some prominent neurologists he had even given up his practice for a couple of years to spend the time on a ranch, but the vacation had done him no good.

I examined his eyes and found no organic defects and no error of refraction. Yet his vision with each eye was only three-fourths of the normal and he suffered from double vision and all sorts of unpleasant symptoms. He used to see people standing on their heads and little devils dancing on the tops of the high buildings. He also had other illusions too numerous to be mentioned here. At night his sight was so bad that he had difficulty in finding his way about, and when walking along a country road he believed that he saw better when he turned his eyes far to one side and viewed the road with the side of the retina instead of with the center. At variable intervals, without warning and without loss of consciousness, he had attacks of blindness. These caused him great uneasiness, for he was a surgeon with a large and lucrative practice and he feared that he might have an attack while operating.

His memory was very poor. He could not remember the color of the eyes of any member of his family, although he had seen them all daily for years. Neither could he recall the color of his house, the number of rooms on the different floors, or other details. The faces and names of patients and friends he recalled with difficulty or not at all.

This man’s treatment proved to be very difficult, chiefly because he had an infinite number of erroneous ideas about physiological optics in general and his own case in particular. He insisted that all these should be discussed, and while the discussions were going on he received no benefit. Every day for hours at a time over a long period he talked and argued. His logic was wonderful, apparently unanswerable, and yet utterly wrong.

His eccentric fixation was of such high degree that when he looked at a point forty-five degrees to one side of the big C on the test card he saw the letter just as black as when he looked directly at it. The strain to do this was terrific and produced much astigmatism, but the patient was unconscious of it and could not be convinced that there was anything abnormal in the symptom. If he saw the letter at all, he argued, he must see it as black as it really was, because he was not color-blind. Finally he became able to look away from one of the smaller letters on the card and see it worse than when he looked directly at it. It took eight or nine months to accomplish this, but when it had been done the patient said that it seemed as if a great burden had been lifted from his mind. He experienced a wonderful feeling of rest and relaxation throughout his whole body.

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