Eye Care Blog

At the request of the superintendent of schools in Grand Forks at that time, the system was introduced into all the schools of the city and was used continuously for eight years. During this time it reduced myopia among the children, which I found at first to be about six per cent, to less than one per cent.

A few years later the same system was introduced into some of the schools of New York City, with an attendance of about ten thousand children. Many of the teachers, however, neglected to use the cards, being unable to believe that such a simple method, and one so entirely at variance with previous teaching on the subject, could accomplish the desired results. Others kept the cards in a closet except when they were needed for the daily eye drill, lest the children should memorize them. Thus they not only put an unnecessary burden upon themselves but also did what they could to defeat the purpose of the system, which is to give the children daily exercise in distant vision with a familiar object.

A considerable number of teachers, on the other hand, used the system intelligently and persistently, and in less than a year were able to present reports showing that of three thousand children with imperfect sight, over one thousand had obtained normal vision by its means. Some of these children, as in the case of the children of Grand Forks, were relieved in a few minutes. Many of the teachers also were relieved, some of them very quickly. Sometimes the results of the system were nothing short of astonishing—but in the end the board of education and the eyeglass specialists couldn’t agree, and gradually the use of test cards for this purpose was dropped.

In a class of mental defectives, where the teacher had kept records of the eyesight of the children for several years, it had been found that their vision grew steadily worse as each term advanced. As soon as the test card was introduced, however, they began to improve. Then came a doctor from the local board of health who tested the eyes of the children and put glasses on all of them, even those whose sight was fairly good. The use of the card was then discontinued, as the teacher did not consider it proper to interfere while the children were wearing glasses prescribed by a physician.

Very soon, however, the children began to lose, break, or discard their glasses. Some said that the spectacles gave them headaches, or that they felt better without them. In the course of a month or so, most of the aids to vision which the board of health had supplied had disappeared. The teacher then felt herself at liberty to resume the use of the test card. Its benefits were immediate. The eyesight and the mental reactions of the children improved simultaneously, and soon many of them were drafted into the regular classes, because it was found that they were making as much progress in their studies as the other children were.

Another teacher reported an equally interesting experience. She had a class of children who did not fit into the other grades. Many of them were backward in their studies, some were persistent truants, and all of them had defective eyesight. A test card was hung in the classroom where all the children could see it, and the teacher carried out my instructions literally. At the end of six months all except two of the children had normal sight, and these two had definitely improved, while the worst incorrigible and the worst truant had become decent students.

To remove any doubts that might arise as to the cause of the improvement noted in the eyesight of the children, comparative tests were made with and without test cards. In one case six pupils with defective sight were examined daily for one week without the use of the card. No improvement took place. The card was then restored to its place and the group was instructed to read it every day. At the end of a week all had improved and five were completely normal. With another group of defectives the results were similar. During the week that the test card was not used, no improvement was noted; but after a week of exercises in distant vision with the card, all showed marked improvement, and at the end of a month all were normal.

In order that there might be no question as to the reliability of the records of the teachers, in some cases the principals of the schools involved asked the board of health to send an inspector to test the vision of the pupils, and whenever this was done the records were found to be correct.

One day I visited the city of Rochester, New York, and while there I called on the superintendent of public schools and told him about my method of preventing myopia. He was very much interested and invited me to introduce it in one of his schools. I did so, and at the end of three months a report was sent to me showing that the vision of all the children had improved, while quite a number of them had obtained normal vision in both eyes. The system, however, later met with the same end here that it had in New York City.

My method has been used in a number of other cities, and always the vision of all the children improved, many of them obtaining normal vision in the course of a few minutes, days, weeks, or months. It is difficult to prove a negative proposition, but since this method improved the vision of all the children who used it, it follows that none could have grown worse. It is therefore obvious that it must have prevented myopia. This cannot be said of any method of preventing myopia in schools which had previously been tried. All other methods are based on the idea that it is the excessive use of the eyes for near work that causes myopia, and all of them have admittedly failed.

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