THE NEW OPHTHALMOLOGY 443 



serum treatment of diphtheria, Pasteur's anti-rabies inoculations, 

 the humane treatment of the insane, etc. 



Now the amazing fact about all of this is its ease of proof or dis- 

 proof, the passionate hatred with which was rejected a possible 

 source of relief of human suffering, the harmlessness of the trial, 

 the utter forgetting of the patient, the supreme interest in the pre- 

 judice. Vaccination is harmless and its protective effect easily 

 demonstrated. To tap the chest with the finger is a very simple 

 proceeding and the sounds elicited are easily recognized. It is not 

 difficult, if so minded, for the nurse, midwife, and doctor to be 

 clean, and thus test if puerperal fever is contagious. The physi- 

 cians who clamored against railway travel because it would make 

 passengers sick, giddy, or insane, and said if the foolish would 

 build railways board fences must be raised above the height of 

 the cars, these physicians could have got on the cars and dis- 

 proved their theory. The opposers of the theory of circulation of 

 the blood might at least have tested the theory by pricking their 

 fingers. The prejudice against rabies inoculation, the diphtheria 

 antitoxin, the mosquito theory of malaria and yellow fever, etc., 

 which resulted in untold deaths and delay of scientific progress, 

 could have been easily tested. It is childishly simple to test the 

 power of astigmatism to produce or cure migraine, and yet many 

 prefer not to make the test. 



There are probably not a half-dozen hospitals or ophthalmic clin- 

 ics in the world fitted with a trial-frame or set of test-lenses that 

 would enable even an expert refractionist to diagnose ametropia 

 with the perfect accuracy which is necessary to cure morbid ocular 

 reflexes. But those set to do refraction work in the public clinics 

 are not expert. They are the students and learners. Hence nine 

 tenths of the glasses prescribed in these institutions are not correct. 

 Ophthalmic surgery and inflammatory diseases are all that inter- 

 est, and these would be largely preventable by the refraction that 

 is neglected and misdone. 



Even in the institutions for the blind, it has been found that some 

 of the inmates are not blind, and that their remnants of vision may 

 be so vastly improved as to make these dependents self-supporting. 

 In every school of the world at least 20 per cent of the pupils are 

 suffering from ill-health due to imperfect eyes, and yet pedagogics, 

 except infinitesimally and incipiently, does not know and does not 

 care. The teachers and professors in preparatory schools, colleges, 

 universities, technical and other schools, pay little or no attention to 

 the ventilation of the rooms, or to the refraction of the eyes of their 

 students. These are constantly breaking down in health, or in study, 

 from migraine, etc., and the general scholarship is vastly depre- 

 ciated because of the neglect of the eyes. An official and resident 



