THE NEW OPHTHALMOLOGY 445 



increased an hundredfold, why the strange phenomena of vastly 

 increased skepticism, mental suffering, hopelessness, and melan- 

 choly? Who have set the fashion? Certain powerful, but in some 

 respects morbid, literary geniuses. Who were they? Those almost 

 without exception who were great sufferers from physical disease. 

 Of what disease? Simply of "migraine." Without a thought of the 

 class to which they may belong, make a list of the literary pessimists 

 of the last century and another list of the optimists. The pessimistic 

 or gloomy writers and artists were almost entirely great sufferers from 

 eye-strain and from its result migraine. They were, for instance, 

 Nietzsche, the two Carlyles, de Maupassant, George Eliot, Wagner, 

 Tchaikowsky, Chopin, Symonds, Tolstoi, Heine, Leopardi, Scho- 

 penhauer, Turner, Obermann, Thomson (the younger), Poe, and 

 many others. Others that partially or wholly conquered the "mi- 

 graine " of eye-strain by opium, or by renouncing ocular near-work, 

 by walking, etc., are Mrs. Browning, DeQuincey , Coleridge, Beethoven, 

 Parkman, Whittier, Margaret Fuller, Browning, Huxley, Spencer, 

 Taine, Darwin, Lewes, Hugh Miller, Southey, etc. 



The optimists the cheerful, hopeful, encouraging, loving, and 

 helpful ones were, a few and at random, Goethe, Mozart, Verdi, 

 Ruskin, Wordsworth, Renan, Chateaubriand, Hugo, Zola, Sainte- 

 Beuve, George Sand, Emerson, Lowell, Longfellow, Kant, Scott, 

 Bronte, Dumas, Voltaire, Gibbon, Macaulay, Mommsen, and a host 

 of others. 



In not one of the lives or writings of these last will you find a hint 

 of eye-strain, or migraine, hardly even of ill-health. Note also that the 

 pessimists are mostly atheistic and materialistic, while hardly one of 

 the healthy optimists is so. One may also remember the tendency to 

 despair and even suicide in those who suffered most from migraine. 

 It is exactly so in private practice to-day. Pessimism and atheism 

 are an expensive" tax on the national vitality, a danger to the public 

 health, a brake on the wheels of the progress of civilization. If we 

 care naught for the personal and preventable sufferings of these great 

 workers in humanity's cause, nothing for those of the literary and 

 other laborers tremendously increased by the very nature of their 

 tasks, we at least should consider the welfare of the generations 

 that follow us. As the creation and perfection of vision has been the 

 condition of past biologic evolution, so its normalization and the 

 avoidance of its pathogenic results is one of our highest professional 

 duties and ideals. 



