Blindness in Childhood

Nearly all material in this section relates to the surveys undertaken by George Fraser for his thesis and book The Causes of Blindness in Childhood. As with section B there are many case files which include questionnaires, medical notes, correspondence with parents of affected children, family and hospital doctors, teachers and education authority officials (many of the children were in special schools).

There is also information on fifty cases of children with visual handicap from Townsend House, South Australia 1965-1967. Fraser was chiefly studying sex-linked myopia. The section also presents material assembled for publications on cases of Choroideremia, Iminoglycinuria and Dysplasia spondyloepiphysaria congenita.

George Fraser began his study of visual handicaps with the Godfrey Robinson Unit, Department of Research in Ophthalmology of the Royal College of Surgeons of London in 1963. He was working under Professor Arnold Sorsby. The work was supported by the Royal National Institute for the Blind.

Like his survey of children with auditory abnormalities, the methodology for the study was based on Penrose's 'Colchester Survey' ('A clinical and genetic survey of 1280 cases of mental defect', Medical Research Council, Special Report 229, 1938), and using records from special schools for the visually disabled in England and Wales Fraser identified 776 children (aged 1-22) for study. Between 1963 and 1965 he examined, together with an ophthalmological colleague, Allan Friedmann over 90% of these children and obtained extensive medical and social information on their cases. He assigned the visual handicap to one of four categories: mainly genetically determined, prenatally acquired, perinatally acquired and postnatally acquired. Most cases were either genetically determined or perinatally acquired (nearly all due to oxygen enrichment of the environment of premature babies).

The work was presented as Fraser's M.D. thesis for the University of Cambridge under the title 'The causes of blindness in childhood: a study of 776 children with severe visual handicap in special schools'. It was awarded the Raymond Horton-Smith prize for the best M.D. thesis for the year 1965-1966. It was published, in a slightly revised form, as The Causes of Blindness in Childhood. A study of 776 children with severe visual handicaps, by Fraser and A. I. Friedmann, with a preface by L. S. Penrose, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1967).

Following his move to Adelaide, Fraser continued to study cases of blindness encountered in South Australia and this was published as 'Causes of severe visual handicap among schoolchildren in South Australia', Medical Journal of Australia, Vol. 1 (1968).