On defects of vision which are remediable by Optical appliances : a course of lectures delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons of England.

  • Carter, Robert Brudenell, 1828-1918.
Date:
1877
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On defects of vision which are remediable by Optical appliances : a course of lectures delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons of England. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by UCL Library Services. The original may be consulted at UCL (University College London)

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    children ! If we think what this exclamation meant, and if we apply the lesson which it teaches to other pursuits, we shall not fail to perceive that the practical effect of myopia is to shut out the subject of it from a very large amount of the unconscious education which the process of seeing the world involves, and thus to occasion losses which can hardly be made up in any other way. Taken in detail, these losses, the mere not seeing of this or that seeming trifle, may appear insignificant; it is their aggregate which becomes important. A very distinguished man of science, who is myopic in a high degree, and who did not receive glasses until he was nineteen or twenty years old, has often told me how much he had to do in order to place himself upon the same level, with regard to experience of quite common things, with many of his normal-sighted contemporaries; and it will be manifest on reflection that the matters which are lost by the short-sighted, as by the partially deaf, make up a very large proportion of the pleasures of existence. I am accustomed, on this ground, strongly to urge upon parents the necessity of correcting myopia in their children ; and I am sure that a visual horizon of ten or even twenty inches, with no distinct perception of objects at a greater distance, has a marked tendency to produce habits of introspection and reverie, and of habitual inattention to outward things, which may lay the foundation of grave defects of character. Landscape painters are the only people to whom a small degree of myopia can be useful. I once accompanied a landscape painter on a sketching expedition, and after a time asked him whether he intended to omit a certain house from his sketch. He looked up with surprise, and said, What house ? There is no house there ! I at once understood a certain haziness of aspect with which it was his custom to clothe distant scenery in his pictures, and which was very much admired by persons who mistook it for a skilful rendering of an uncommon atmospheric effect. In fact, it was only what the short-sighted man saw always before him ; and I am sure he must himself have been greatly puzzled by much of the praise which he received. Soon after I first published, in the Practitioner for 1874, a reference to this effect of myopia upon