Volume 1

Health lectures for the people.

Date:
1883-1892
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Health lectures for the people. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    tion of living authorities in a manner that admits of no dispute. All English ophthalmologists are agreed that myopia is becoming daily- more frequent amongst us ; and Mr Badderch Hewetson and Mr Edgar Browne made it abundantly clear, at the meeting of the Social Science Association at Huddersfield on the 4th inst., that this increased pre- valence of myopia is attributable to school-work and over-employment of the eyes on print by children and young persons. The strain of the eyes in reading and fine sewing required of children now to bring them up to the standards which they have to pass results in deformity of these organs, which is more especially apt to occur when there is an inherited tendency to it, where general bodily nutrition is faulty, or where the construction of the school furniture and distribution of the light are faulty. Now these facts as to the spread of short-sightedness amongst the young are alone sufficient to prove that educational over- pressure exists, and in view of them it is in vain for members and officials of school boards, who seem all to assume a pedagogic infalli- bility of tone, to asseverate that the present system is doing no harm, and that the doctors are simply foolish alarmists because they suggest that it is. If education, as now conducted, is causing wholesale short- sightedness, it ought to be overhauled and amended without delay, for, in homely phrase, the game is not worth the candle, and an elementary knowledge of reading, writing, and arithmetic is dearly purchased by the partial blocking up of one of the great gateways of knowledge, which ought to remain the principal inlet of edification and delight all through life. But these defects of vision which have been alluded to do not exhaust the indictment against education in these days. Worse remains behind. The children whose eyes fail them, and who go on groping over their relentless task in dimness and confusion, complain of headaches, and hundreds of other children whose sight remains good also experience frequent pains in the forehead or vertex. In a certain proportion of these cases the headaches are relieved by the use of appropriate glasses, but in a large number they persist in spite of all ophthalmological efforts, and are shown to depend on a state of irritation of the brain. And it is scarcely to be wondered at that the brain should suffer from processes which leave their per- nicious impress on the eye. The eye is a delicate organ, but, compared with the brain, it is what a ship's cable is to a cobweb, and it is certain that any operations in which they are both engaged that are detrimental to the one will be tenfold more detrimental to the other. We really wish that our educationalists, who habitually talk of the brain as if it were a hard and stony structure that will stand any amount of chisel- ling and polishing, could see a microscopic section of a shred of it. Looking at a group of its starry cells, with their innumerable branches