Eyestrain and the literary life : read before the Canadian Medical Association, August 25th, 1903 / by George M. Gould.

  • Gould, George Milbrey, 1848-1922.
Date:
1903
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: Eyestrain and the literary life : read before the Canadian Medical Association, August 25th, 1903 / by George M. Gould. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    th6 anorexia of such children, is also indicative ot the same morbid cause. Extreme sensitiveness to noise is an aspect of the symptom of insomnia that has been noticed. Com[)laint of the “ nervousness ” of patients young or older the “ fidgetiness,” etc., of the waste and rush of our modern nervous life, fills the newspapers and magazines. Much of it is due to eyestrain. As high a proportion as 50 per cent, or over of modern school-children are pronounced backward or subnormal in physical and mental qualities. Child-suicide, the most frightful symptom of civiliz- ation, and general insanity, are both mathematically in proportion to the number of hours of school-study demanded. A critic has spoken lightlj^ of the vast amount of drugs taken by the Carlyles in their struggle to prevent or cure their diseases. Quain was scornful and said that drugs and gingerbread caused Carlyle’s woe. Nietzsche’s sister, as much as the beautiful soul can be, is harsh-toned when she alludes to her brother’s drug-taking. But what else could they do ? Who would not do the same under the like provocation ? And Mrs. Carlyle would have been happier if she had taken as much morphin as Mrs. Browning. It is indeed true that opium was a blessing to De Quincey, as he said it was. Before stopping I wish to allude to facial eyestrain expression. Observant oculists notice it when some patients enter the room. It is not always present, just as ocular symptoms may be absent in the worst cases. I should say that the expression of the eyes and face is character- istically morbidized in 50 per cent of such patients, e:'pecially the older ones. In children with eyestrain anemia, anorexia, and night-terrors, it is however, usually to be detected. It is not a result of heterophoria, the latent or the permanent turning of the eye outward, such as De Quincey and Wagner had. That is a different matter and causes a different expression. It is an almost indescribable haunting signal, as of exhausted and hopeless suffering, a sort of haggard, sunken look, telling a tale of pained, tired, and usele.«s effort. In the late photographs of Darwin, of Carlyle, of Mrs. Carlyle, and of Whittier, it is evident, and suggestions of it exist in those of others. (It was this look that first suggested to me many years ago that Carlyle was an eyestrain sufferer). It is plainly present in the pictures of Beethoven, Tennyson, Mrs. Browing, etc. The “ Bachelder eye ” of Webster, Whittier, etc., I suspect was a result of the intensity and victory of the effort to compensate for the eyestrain present. Old painters sometimes reproduced the eyestrain expression more or less perfectly in their pictures of medieval saints and ascetics Lastly, I cannot forbear allusion to the influence eyestrain sequels have had on the growth, during the last century, of European spas and