THE NEW OPHTHALMOLOGY 431 



be of limited and infrequent service for chronic patients whose 

 vitality and resisting powers have been worn to a thread by a half- 

 life of torture for which no therapeutics availed. But even the 

 ordered rest-cure could often be avoided by correction of eye-strain, 

 and in perhaps 75 per cent of cases the neurasthenic break-downs 

 and chronic hysterias could have been prevented by attention to 

 the matter in adolescence. Not infrequently it is plain that the 

 resting is curative because the eyes are rested. With reading and 

 writing interdicted there are often astonishing cures: with resump- 

 tion of reading and writing, relapses and returns to the sanitarium 

 are required. 



Every sensation and its every correlated motion is an example 

 of reflex action, and yet there are those who airily scoff at the very 

 possibility of reflex neuroses and other diseases due to reflex 

 action. There are those who speak scornfully of mysticism and 

 mystery in medicine, while satisfied with a practice which reduces 

 itself to diagnosis and naming unknown mysteries as migraine, 

 neurasthenia, hysteria, psychosis, etc. 



Psychiatry seems to have reached the goal of its ambition, - 

 theoretic classification, nomenclature gone mad, and therapeutic 

 nihilism. Diagnosing and naming a morbid mental condition 

 as "a katatonic state," "major psychosis," "melancholia of invo- 

 lution," "psychical ton us or contracture," "dementia precox," 

 "forme fruste," "manic depressive insanity," "confusional psych- 

 osis," "psychoneurosis," "pseudoneurasthenia," "mysophobia," 

 "topoalgia," "neurasthenical syndrome," etc., all of which terms 

 are culled from one short article, seem to end in the air so far 

 as bettering conditions. 



Who has examined the refraction of the insane? What patient 

 with extreme eye-strain or migraine has not feared insanity? The 

 sanest of men, Parkman, was pronounced insane, and so was Wagner 

 and others, by great authorities, at the climax of their sufferings. 

 Was not Nietzsche's "atypical paralysis" intimately connected 

 with his most evident eye-strain? A competent oculist finds the 

 majority of the young criminals of the Elmira Reformatory afflicted 

 with so high a degree of ametropia as to make study, reading, and 

 writing, and ordinary handicrafts, impossible. What else could 

 many of the poor boys do but play truant and steal? The statistics 

 showing the relation of crime to truancy indicate that some of 

 both may be due to bad eyes. In 232 cases of suicide, 187 were due 

 to ill-health. About 50 per cent of chronic epileptics have unsym- 

 metric astigmatism and anisometropia, a surprising ratio of a 

 defect especially prone to upset the cerebral health and balance. 

 And the peculiarity of the diseases of eye-strain is their tendency 

 to produce psychic and emotional disorder, despair, melancholy, etc. 



