The Cure of Imperfect Sight by Treatment Without Glasses

William Horatio Bates

Description

The Cure of Imperfect Sight by Treatment Without Glasses by William Horatio Bates. A brilliant book written by an eye-surgeon for the masses.
William Horatio Bates (1860–1931) was an American physician who practiced ophthalmology and developed what became known as the Bates Method for better eyesight, a method intended to improve vision by undoing a supposed habitual strain to see. The book contains findings after decades of research and experimental work into various eye disorders. The author was amazed at his own discoveries and the effect they had for the treatment of defective vision.

Sujets

• Vision
• Fitness
• Health

Informations

• Publié par: Rare Treasure Editions
• Date de parution: 09 novembre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781774644034
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Cure of Imperfect Sight by Treatment Without Glasses
by William Horatio Bates

First published in 1944
This edition published by Rare Treasures
Victoria, BC Canada with branch offices in the Czech Republic and Germany
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except in the case of excerpts by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
TO THE MEMORY
OF THE
PIONEERS OF OPHTHALMOLOGY
THIS BOOK IS
GRATEFULLY DEDICATED
THE CURE OF IMPERFECT SIGHT BY TREATMENT WITHOUT GLASSES




by WILLIAM HORATIO BATES, M.D.

I also gratefully acknowledge my indebtedness to Emily A.Bates, whose co-operation during four years of arduous labourand repeated failure made it possible to carry the work toa successful conclusion.
I The Theory and the Facts
Most writers on ophthalmology appear to believe that thelast word about problems of refraction (the deviation of lightwaves as they enter the eye) has been spoken, and accordingto their theories the last word is a very depressing one.Almost everyone in these days suffers from some form ofrefractive error. Yet we are told that for these ills, whichnot only are inconvenient but often are distressing anddangerous, there is no cure, no palliative except those opticcrutches known as eyeglasses, and, under modern conditionsof life, practically no preventive measure.
It is a well-known fact that the human body is not a perfectmechanism. Nature, in the evolution of the human tenement,has been guilty of some maladjustments. She has leftbehind, for instance, some troublesome bits of scaffolding,like the vermiform appendix. But nowhere is she supposed tohave blundered so badly as in the construction of the eye.With one accord ophthalmologists tell us that the visual organof man was never intended for the uses to which it is now put.
Eons before there were any schools or printing presses,electric lights or moving pictures, the evolution of the eyewas complete. In those days it served the needs of the humananimal perfectly. Man was a hunter, a herdsman, a farmer,a fighter. He needed, we are told, mainly distant vision; andsince the eye at rest is adjusted for distant vision, sight issupposed to have been ordinarily as passive as the perceptionof sound, requiring no muscular action whatever. Near vision,it is assumed, was the exception, necessitating a muscularadjustment of such short duration that it was accomplishedwithout placing any appreciable burden upon the mechanismof accommodation (the adjustment of the eye to differentdistances). The fact that primitive woman was a seamstress, an embroiderer, a weaver, an artist in all sorts of fine andbeautiful work, appears to have been generally forgotten.Yet women living under primitive conditions have just asgood eyesight as the men.
When man learned how to communicate his thoughts toothers by means of written and printed forms, there camesome undeniably new demands upon the eye, affecting atfirst only a few people but gradually including more andmore, until now, in the more advanced countries, the greatmass of the population is subjected to their influence. A fewhundred years ago even princes were not taught to read andwrite. Now we compel everyone to go to school, whether hewishes to or not, and even babies are sent to kindergarten.A generation or so ago books were scarce and expensive.Today, by means of libraries of all sorts, stationary and travelling,they have been brought within the reach of almosteveryone. The modern newspaper, with its endless columnsof badly printed reading matter, was made possible by thediscovery of the art of manufacturing paper from wood,which is a thing of yesterday. Only lately has the tallowcandle been displaced by the various forms of artificial lighting,which tempt most of us to prolong our vocations andavocations into hours during which primitive man wasforced to rest. Even more recently has come the movingpicture to complete the supposedly destructive process.
Was it reasonable to expect that Nature should have providedfor all these developments and produced an organ thatcould respond to the new demands? It is the accepted beliefof ophthalmology today that she could not and did not, andthat, while the processes of civilization depend upon the senseof sight more than upon any other, the visual organ isimperfectly fitted for its tasks.
There are a great number of facts which seem to justifythis conclusion. While primitive man appears to have sufferedlittle from defects of vision, it is safe to say that ofpersons over twenty-one living under civilized conditions,nine out of every ten have imperfect sight, and as the ageincreases the proportion increases, until at forty it is almost impossible to find a person free from visual defects. Voluminousstatistics prove these assertions.
For more than a hundred years the medical profession hasbeen seeking some method of checking the ravages of civilizationupon the human eye. The Germans, to whom the matterhas been one of vital military importance, have spent millionsof dollars in carrying out the suggestions of experts, butwithout avail; and it is now admitted by most students of thesubject that the methods which were once confidently advocatedas reliable safeguards for the eyesight of our childrenhave accomplished little or nothing. Some take a morecheerful view of the matter, but their conclusions are hardlyborne out by the facts.
For the prevailing method of treatment, by means of artificiallenses which compensate for the refractive error of theeye, very little was ever claimed except that these contrivancesneutralized the effects of the various conditions for whichthey were prescribed, as a crutch enables a lame man towalk. It has also been believed that they sometimes checkedthe progress of these conditions; but every ophthalmologistnow knows that their usefulness for this purpose, if any, isvery limited. In the case of myopia (short-sightedness), aslong ago as 1916 some ophthalmologists realized that glassesand all ordinary methods at our command “are of but littleavail” in preventing either an increase in the error of refractionor the development of the very serious complicationswith which it is often associated.
I have been studying the refraction of the human eye formore than thirty years, and my observations fully confirmthese conclusions as to the uselessness of all the methods heretoforeemployed for the prevention and treatment of errors ofrefraction. I was very early led to suspect, however, that theproblem was by no means an unsolvable one.
Every ophthalmologist of any experience knows that thetheory of the incurability of errors of refraction does not fitthe observed facts. Not infrequently such cases recover spontaneously,or change from one form to another. It has longbeen the custom either to ignore these troublesome facts or to explain them away, and fortunately for those who consider itnecessary to bolster up the old theories at all costs, the roleattributed to the lens of the eye in accommodation offers, inthe majority of cases, a plausible method of explanation.
According to this theory, which most of us learned atschool, the eye changes its focus for vision at different distancesby altering the curvature of the lens; and in seeking anexplanation for the inconstancy of the theoretically constanterror of refraction, the theorists hit upon the very ingeniousidea of attributing to the lens a capacity for changing its curvaturenot only for the purpose of normal accommodation butalso to cover up or to produce accommodative errors. Inhypermetropia (commonly but improperly called far-sightedness,although the patient with such a defect can see clearlyneither at the distance nor at the near-point) the eyeball istoo short from the front to the back, and all rays of light,both the convergent ones coming from near objects and theparallel ones coming from distant objects, are focused behindthe retina instead of upon it. In myopia it is too long from thefront to the back, and while the divergent rays from nearobjects come to a point upon the retina, the parallel ones fromdistant objects do not reach it.
Both of these conditions are supposed to be permanent, theone congenital, the other acquired. Thus when persons whoat one time appear to have hypermetropia or myopia appearat other times not to have them, or to have them in lesserdegrees, it is not permissible to suppose that there has beena change in the shape of the eyeball. Therefore, in the caseof the disappearance or lessening of hypermetropia, we areasked to believe that the eye, in the act of vision, both at thenear-point and at the distance, increases the curvature of thelens sufficiently to compensate, in whole or in part, for theflatness of the eyeball. In myopia, on the contrary, we aretold that the eye actually goes out of its way to produce thecondition, or to make an existing condition worse. In otherwords, the so-called “ciliary muscle”, believed to control theshape of the lens, is credited with a capacity for getting intoa more or less continuous state of contraction, thus keeping the lens continuously in a state of convexity which, accordingto the theory, it ought to assume only for vision at the near-point.
These curious performances may seem unnatural to the laymind, but ophthalmologists believe the tendency to indulgein them to be so ingrained in the constitution of the organ ofvision that, in the fitting of glasses, it is customary to instilatropine—the “drops” with which everyone who has visitedan oculist is familiar—into the eye, for the purpose of paralysingthe ciliary muscle and thus, by preve