Reflex neuroses arising from ocular and nasal abnormalities : oration in ophthalmology / by S. Lewis Ziegler.

  • Ziegler, S. Lewis (Samuel Lewis), 1861-1926.
Date:
[1908]
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: Reflex neuroses arising from ocular and nasal abnormalities : oration in ophthalmology / by S. Lewis Ziegler. 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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    The views of de Schweinitz'*, who has voiced the feeling of the profession in the matter most fairly and concisely, are of great interest in this connection because of his well known conservatism. He says: It is unquestionably true that fully seventy-five per cent, of ocular disorders depend on anomalies of the refraction, accommodation, and motility of the eyes. Correction of such faults is followed by the greatest good to the eye and to the general organism in which the strain has been in- terpreted by symptoms not necessarily suggestive of their origin. When one comes to think about them, these symptoms stretch out into an extraordinary train, but we have ceased to wondfer, and as a matter of course investi- gate or cause to be investigated the eye whenever search- ing for the aetiology of headache of all kinds, vertigo, nausea, pseudo and habit chorea, neurasthenia, and other disease phenomena of similar manifestation. We have learned that many so called gastric troubles, tachycardia, flatulent and other types of dyspepsia, indigestions, night terrors, especially as they occur in children, may have a like origin, and we have found out that pains strangely and persistently situated in the nape of the neck, between and under the shoulder blades, at the end of the spine and deep in the mastoid may owe their origin to the same cause. These facts are widely, I think I may say univer- sally, known, although, curiously enough, many of the most important of them find no place in the most used textbooks on general medicine. Musser expresses view^s almost identical with these, when he says, Who has not seen correction of errors of refraction relieve so called 'bilious at- tacks,' periodical vomiting, anorexia, indigestion, and other gastric symptoms. The cure of grave organic ocular defects relieves similar gastric con- ditions. Hansel!' has carefully summed up this interrela- tion between the eye and the general system in say- ing: Any theory of the origin of disordered func- •^Address before the Medical and Chirurgical Faculty of Mary- land, April 26, 1900. ''-Journal of the American Medical Association, November 4, 1905. ■•'Xfuroses of Eyestrain, in Posey and Spillcr, 1906, p. 775.