Eyesight in relation to compensation : being a paper read in the Section of Ophthalmology at the Annual Meeting of the British Medical Association, Toronto, August, 1906 / by Freeland Fergus.

  • Fergus, A. Freeland (Andrew Freeland), 1858-1932.
Date:
[1906?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Eyesight in relation to compensation : being a paper read in the Section of Ophthalmology at the Annual Meeting of the British Medical Association, Toronto, August, 1906 / by Freeland Fergus. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Reprinted from the British Medical Journal, December 2'Jth, 1906. EYESIGHT IN RELATION TO COMPENSATION. Being a Paper read in the Section of Ophthalmology at the Annual Meeting of the British Medical Association, Toronto, August, 1906. By FREELAND FERGUS, M.D., F.F.P.S.G., F.R.S.E., Surgeon, Glasgow Eye Infirmary ; Examiner in Physics to the Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow. There is an obvioug, although at times little realized, connexion between all phases of the healing art and economic science. Vital statistics, giving as they do valuable information regarding the population of a district or country, are of immense importance to the political economist, for on the population of a country its power of material production largely depends. This dependence of economics on medicine, especially on that branch of it which is known as public health, meets the economist at many points which need not be elaborated in this paper. Two familiar examples will illustrate my meaning. The advance of medical science has appreciably increased the expectancy of life, at any rate in civilized countries. Owing to the efforts of public-health authori¬ ties, and probably, also, to the improvements which have taken place in surgical practice, the average of human life is now greater than it was only a few years ago. People, as a rule, live longer. One of the effects of this on economic science is that the actuarial tables used, say, fifty years ago by companies doing life assurance business, are now found to be more or less obsolete. On the other hand, statistics may help to determine the line of treatment to be pursued by the physician or surgeon in a given case. We know, for example, from a study of comparative death-rates, that the treatment of diphtheria by antidiphtheritic serum is much better than any other line of treatment hitherto adopted. All departments of medicine are of a certain economic importance to the community, and the connexion between economics and ophthalmic science has become much more obvious of recent years, at least so far as the United Kingdom is concerned, by the enactment of laws regarding workmen’s compensation.