Colour-blindness and other defects of sight in some of their medico-legal aspects / by James T. Tudall.

  • Rudall, James T.
Date:
1887
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Colour-blindness and other defects of sight in some of their medico-legal aspects / by James T. Tudall. 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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    position. Another employe, testing him, of course certifies to him. No. lO. A fireman, with vision normal and not colour- blind, comes to be tested on his own idea, as he has never been tested or certified to by his road, where he has been some time. Road subject to one hundred dollars fine. No. II. Engineer, fifty-six years old, brought by his superintendent, is not colour-blind; his vision, O. U. = The superintendent was frightened and took him off his engine. Under legal standard requirements and legal expert testing this injustice could not have been done the man. No. 12. A conductor has lost his place on 2S\ employes' examination. He is quite hypermetropic, easily corrected by glasses, which there is no objection to his wearing. Another injustice from want of legal standards of requirement and testing. On learning my name his abuse was profuse, though all my efforts have been to prevent such injustice to employes. Office-seekers had falsely misled him. It is unnecessary to quote at length the errors which had been previously made as to the colour sense in the cases which Dr. Joy Jeffries records—errors on both sides—in passing men who were colour-blind and in rejecting others who had little or no defect of colour sense. I submit that ample evidence has been brought forward to show that under the absence of definite standards of sharpness of sight for form, for colour, and of refraction, and under such crude methods of testing as have hitherto been employed in Victoria, as I said in my previous paper, neither the Govern- ment, nor the Railway Commissioners, nor the Steam Navigation Board, have yet been moved to take measures to ensure the public safety in travelling by land and sea. When we want to know if a man is five feet eight inches high, we do not trust to the accuracy of our judgment, but we simply take a rule and measure him. So should it be with form and colour perception. We know practically the sizes and the shades of colour which the normal eye can appreciate, and we can measure whether the refraction is insufficient, or more than sufficient (and exactly how far too much or too little) to bring parallel rays to a focus on the retina. Similarly with the field of vision and with the strength of the converging and diverging ocular muscles. I therefore say, again, with Dr. Joy Jeffries— Standard requirements and competent expert examiners can alone insure honesty and fairness to all