164 On Light in some of its Relations to Disease. 



the nose, the eyebrow, or the cheek-bones ; and, as we see 

 family likenesses prevailing among those who are related 

 by ties of consanguinity, so these peculiarities in refraction 

 are family inheritances. 



Surely, it would be a most interesting and important 

 fact were we to find that these nervous predispositions and 

 these refractive evils were to be found in the same families, 

 and yet this is precisely what I have proved in a large 

 number of instances. 



Let me give you one or two examples : A lady, who has 

 for years been the subject of severe headaches, coming on 

 almost every week, and continuing from one to three days, 

 has one brother and two sisters living; a third sister died 

 a few years since. The brother has from boyhood suffered 

 from headaches; her elder sister w^as for years subject to 

 convulsions, which deprived her of consciousness for a 

 time, varying from a few minutes to half an hour, and 

 which occurred about once in three or four weeks; these 

 were possibly epileptic fits. The other living sister has 

 always been subject to neuralgia and nervous headaches, 

 and the sister who died was, like the last, a victim of 

 neuralgia and headache. The eyes, both of the lady first 

 mentioned and of the sister who had convulsions, were 

 found, on testing, to be hypermetropic in a high degree, 

 and from them it was learned that both of the other sisters 

 and the brother were forced to put on old people's glasses 

 before they were twenty-five years old, rendering it almost 

 absolutely certain that they were all hypermetropic, and 

 that this peculiar form of anomalous refraction was a 

 family characteristic. 



A medical friend complained of his oft-recurring nerv- 

 ous headaches, which he said he inherited from his father. 

 He was induced to have the refraction of his eye tested, 

 when it was found that he had astigmatism. An elder 

 sister, who during several years of her early life, was a 



