EYESIGHT AND SPECTACLES.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XIII, Issue V, 4 August 1894, Page 117

EYESIGHT AND SPECTACLES.

The proportion of people who wear spectacles is constantly increasing. Is this a thing to be lamented ? In other words, does it indicate a deterioration of eyesight under modern conditions of life ? Those who may be supposed to be best qualified to answer these questions answer them without hesitation in the negative. More spectacles are worn, not because poor vision is more common, but because the eye has been more intelligently studied. A recent writer in the Atlantic Monthly says that it is the exception to find persons whose eves are normal and perfect. At the annual meeting of the British Medical Association, not long ago, the president of the ophthalmological section expressed the hope that the time will come when ‘ a man who goes about with his eyes naked will be so rare that the sight of him will almost raise a blush.’ This is as much as to say that since almost every man’s sight needs correction, it will be a sign of advancing knowledge when almost every man wears spectacles. Of the advance already made in this direction the Atlantic, writer says :

• The methods of testing the defects of vision have, in the last two decades, been brought to a standard of accuracy and refinement previously unknown. Ihus many troubles, disabilities and maladies hitherto suffered in patience, or treated incorrectly and in vain, are now traced to defects of vision, and are quickly remedied by the use of appropriate glasses, concave, convex, cylindrical, or prismatic. * The schoolboy’s headache, the seamstress’s browache, the convergent squint of childhood, so far as they are the results of faulty refraction, are beginning to be erased from the catalogue of human woes.’ Some specialists go so far as to maintain that every child should have his vision tested by a competent oculist. *lt is far better,’ says the Atlantic writer already quoted, * to discover visual defects and to remedy them at the beginning of school life than to have the child sent home after his sight has been seriously injured, as dull of vision, or unable to get through his studies, and the subject of periodical “bilious headaches”—matters nowadays of constant occurrence.’