Vision and work : the results obtained at a recruting office / by Freeland Fergus.

  • Fergus, A. Freeland (Andrew Freeland), 1858-1932
Date:
[1918?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Vision and work : the results obtained at a recruting office / by Freeland Fergus. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    say, an island, or a lighthouse, or another ship. No doubt he will likely turn that part of the field of vision which is possessed of visual acuteness on this new object, but he need not necessarily do so, and, in fact, if he is intent on the first object, he may content himself with bestowing what is called the tail of his eye to the second. There is scarcely any form of purely manual labour where visual acuteness is required. It is all but entirely done by the form-sense. A man does not necessarily use his visual acuteness when wheeling a barrow or when using a pick or a hammer, or when employing almost any implement of agriculture. In the Toronto paper already referred to, I mentioned the case of a collier, with 15 dioptres of myopia and visual acuteness of only 3^, who had worked for many years, earning full wages, and who had not the remotest idea that there was anything wrong with his sight till he tried to get employment in the service of a railway company. For other cases of a perfectly similar nature I may refer to the same paper, which was published in the British Medical Journal, vol. ii, 1906, pp. 1865— 1866. Finally, in walking along a street, a man, for the most part, reads the signs and the names of the streets by his visual acuteness, but he almost invariably avoids his fellow-men who are walking on the same thorough¬ fare by his form-sense and not by his visual acuteness. Those parts of the field of vision which have the form- sense have also the sense of projection. One other preliminary remark I wish to make. When I began to test recruits I desired to establish a relation¬ ship between the amount of myopia present in a particular eye and the visual acuteness. I admit at once, of course, that a man cannot be an efficient soldier without good visual acuteness, and it seemed to me an important matter, in view of cases of possible malingering, to determine what degree of utopia, in an eye otherwise perfectly healthy, would give a visual acuteness of ^ or less. The method I took to solve this question was an easy one. I selected from the wards of the hospital a considerable number of
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