DO LEFT-HANDERS SQUINT?

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 5 January 1925, Page 2

DO LEFT-HANDERS SQUINT?

MAKING STAMMERERS. Left-handed people may be disconcerted to hear that, according to the experience of Dr. YV. S. Inman, of the Portsmouth and South Hants Eye and Ear Hospital, such a habit is usually associated with squinting and stammering. After noticing that several squinting child patients were left-handed, and that even when left-handed themselves, a large proportion of the children had left-handed relatives, Dr. Inman made further investigations into the relations between squinting and lefthandedness, with interesting and rather surprising results. “I have been able (he. writes in the Lancet) to collect 1000 cases of squint, very few of which have failed to reveal the existence of left-handedness or stammering in some near relative.” Left-liandedness in a- bowler or batsman, as Dr. Inman remarks, may be useful; but in most cases where a child shows a tendency to use the left hand, the habit is laughed at or corrected by parents or teachers, who have not recognised that there is such a thing as a left-handed temperament, and' that interference with it may be dangerous. “If the left-hander be compared with the rest of his family, brought up by the same parents, it will be found that lie is* generally distinguished by being to a greater degree than his follows self-reliant, critical and obstinate, refusing to be driven, but accepting guidance from those he loves.’’ A squint, apparently, may predispose towards Jeft-handedness in a subject, as in one case noted by Dr. Inman, of a boy of seven, who had squinted since the age of two. “He was right-handed until he was six, when he became friendly with a left-handed boy, and began to copy him, even to tiie extent of learning to write with his left hand. The habit was ‘broken’ by his parents. No other squint, stammer, or left-handedness could be traced in the family.”

“On the other hand,” says Dr. Inman, ‘‘L have known of only on© case wliei-e a left-hander developed a squint when an attempt was made to enforce right-handedness. A boy of seven or eight was sent to. a school where the master insisted upon his becoming right-handed. The'boy found difficulty in compliance, was beaten, and at each beating developed a temporary squint.” Stammering sometimes has followed an attempt to enforce right-handed-ness, and also from an attempt to make a right-handed person ambidexterous. “An elderly father of strong personality. who is keenly interested in manual ' dexterity, had a right-handed daughter, whom he taught to use the left hand without much difficulty or undesirable sequelae. An attempt to educate in the same way a son who was born two or three years later had to be abandoned owing to the development of a stammer.”

One very striking case of relationship between left-handedness and what might be called a. family squint, noted by Dr. Inman, is that of a four-year-old child, the daughter of a naval officer, who suddenly became left-handed after a whipping. The child was chastised for being naughty. . . . Later in the day. when good relations appeared to have been re-established, she was invited to play a. game invented in the family. Over the perforated seat of a chair was stretched a piece of paper, and the players tried to pierce the paper over the holes with a lead pencil. The father tried first, and then passed the pencil to his daughter, who took it and struck with it in her left hand. When she did this a. second time, the father commented upon it, and tried to persuade her to use the right hand in place of the left, hut without success. This was the first occasion on which any sign of left-liand-edness had been given. In this family the father had a. tendency to divergent squint, the mother’s only brother lias a pronounced convergent squint, in one or two of the other children there is a suggestion of a divergent squint, and the mother, though not left-handed, uses mirror writing in making private notes.” \