THE NEW OPHTHALMOLOGY 425 



-if the word, as I think, is still permitted, -- not organic, so its 

 results are at least primarily the same. Headache, the paroxysmal 

 neuroses, many nervous and psychic disorders, epilepsy, chorea, 

 migraine, sick headache, gastric, digestional, and pelvic disorders, 

 dermatoses, influenza, anemia, denutrition, etc., when due to eye- 

 strain, are at first and essentially purely functional. Even those 

 more severe diseases, such as spinal curvature, appendicitis, pul- 

 monary diseases, exophthalmic goiter, etc., which are sometimes 

 directly and indirectly the results of eye-strain, are at first char- 

 acterized by a peculiar stage of functional and remediable disorder, 

 preceding the organic, inflammatory, and incurable one. There 

 are valuable and practical lessons to be gleaned from the fact of 

 the origin of eye-strain in optics at once historic, physical, and 

 physiologic. There is the observation that medical science and 

 pathology did not discover it. The science of physiologic and path- 

 ologic optics came to medicine almost entirely from without. It is 

 the gift of students of physics. Even when physicians busied them- 

 selves with it they did so purely from their interest in vision and clear- 

 seeing, not from that of pathology. Astronomers, physicists, and 

 opticians presented their gift to medicine. Even Bonders had little 

 or no thought of the extension of the practical science made by 

 the practical American ophthalmologist. The earliest refraction- 

 ists we must use the word more or less accidentally and 

 incidentally discovered the facts of the relief of systemic diseases 

 by their spectacles. The patients made the discovery that their 

 headaches and nervous symptoms disappeared when they wore 

 their astigmatic lenses, and they came back and told the aston- 

 ished and delighted oculist about it. Mitchell, not an oculist, heard 

 the story from Thomson, and he told the profession about a little 

 of it. The profession would not listen and utterly ignored it. For 

 several hundred years the official profession would not even have 

 anything to do with the spectacles which the non-professional 

 invented. It allowed Franklin to invent the bifocal lens and failed 

 to adopt it for a hundred years. There are to-day neurologists, 

 diagnosticians, and physicians of international renown who wholly 

 deny that eye-strain causes systemic reflex diseases of any kind. 

 In 1904 a special meeting of the New York Academy of Medicine 

 was held in which great neurologists and ophthalmologists vied 

 with each other in ridiculing the absurdity. It is no wonder there- 

 fore if the stone which the medical builders refused should become 

 the corner-stone of the temple of the opticians. These gentlemen 

 naturally think they have a right to practice the art and science 

 of refraction. Those who scorn the new ophthalmology would in 

 fact reduce the refractionist to an optician. It is a costly blunder 

 which the profession will resent and unlearn. Because refraction 



