Foreward to "Better Eyesight"

[...Foreword

When the United States entered the European war recruits for general
military service were required to have a visual acuity of 20/40 in one
eye and 20/100 in the other.(1) This very low standard, although it is
a matter of common knowledge that it was interpreted with great
liberality, proved to be the greatest physical obstacle to the raising
of an army. Under it 21.68 per cent. of the registrants were rejected,
13 per cent. more than for any other single cause.(2)

Later the standard was lowered (3), issued through office of the
Provost Marshal General. so that men might be "unconditionally
accepted for general military service" with a vision of 20/20 in each
eye without glasses, provided one eye was correctable to 20/40. For
special or limited service they might be accepted with only 20/200 in
each eye without glasses, provided one was correctable to 20/40. At
the same time a great many defects other than errors of refraction
were admitted in both classes, such as squint not interfering with
vision, slight nystagmus, and color blindness. Even total blindness in
one eye was not a cause for rejection to the limited service class,
provided it was not due to progressive or organic change, and the
vision of the other eye was normal. Under this incredible standard eye
defects still remained one of three leading causes of rejection.

Over ten per cent. (10.65) of the registrants were disqualified by
them, while defects of the bones and joints and of the heart and blood-
vessels ran respectively one and one and a half per cent higher.(4)

Most of the revelations about the physical condition of the American
people which resulted from the operation of the draft law had been
anticipated by persons who had been giving their attention to such
matters; and whose warnings had long fallen upon deaf ears;but it is
doubtful if anyone had formed an adequate conception of the truth
regarding the condition of the nation's eyesight. That it should be
impossible to raise an army with even half normal vision in one eye,
and that one man in every ten rejected for military service should
have been unable, even by the aid of glasses, to attain this standard,
is a situation so appalling that words fail to characterize it, so
incredible that only the most unimpeachable evidence could compel
belief in It. Under these circumstances It seems to me the plain duty
of anyone who has found any means of controlling the evil in question
to give the facts the widest possible publicity.

Most writers on ophthalmology today appear to believe that defective
eyesight is part of the price we must pay for civilization. The human
eye, they say, was not designed for the uses to which it is now put.
Eons before there were any schools, or printing presses, electric
lights, or moving pictures, its evolution was complete. In those days
it served the needs of the human animal perfectly, but it is not to be
expected, we are told, that it should respond without injury to the
new demands. By care it is thought that this injury may be minimized,
but to eliminate it wholly is considered to be too much to hope for.
Such is the depressing conclusion to which the monumental labors of a
hundred years and more have led us.

I have no hesitation in stating that this conclusion is unqualifiedly
wrong. Nature did not blunder when she made the human eye, but has
given us in this intricate and wonderful mechanism, upon which so much
of the usefulness as well as the pleasure of life depends, an organ as
fully equal to the needs of civilization as to those of the stone age.
After thirty-three years of clinical and experimental work, I have
demonstrated to my own satisfaction and that of others that the eye is
capable of meeting the utmost demands of civilization; that the errors
of refraction which have so long dogged the footsteps of progress, and
which have made the raising of an army during the recent war so
difficult, are both preventable and curable; and that many other forms
of imperfect sight, long held to be incurable, may be either improved
or completely relieved.

All these discoveries have been published in the medical press, but
while their reliability has never been publicly disputed, the medical
profession has so far failed to make use of them. Meantime the sight
of our children is being destroyed daily in the schools, and our young
men and women are entering life with a defect which, if uncorrected,
must be a source of continual misery and expense to them, sometimes
ending in blindness or economic ruin. Admitting for the sake of
argument that I may be wrong in my conclusion that these things are
unnecessary, it is time I was proven to be wrong. I should not be
allowed to play on the forlorn hope of a suffering world. If I am
right, as I know I am, a suffering world should no longer be deprived
of the benefit of my discoveries.

To give publicity to these discoveries and arouse discussion regarding
them is one of the objects for which this magazine has been started.
At the same time its pages are open to everyone who has any light to
throw upon the problem. It has too long been the custom of
ophthalmologists to disregard every fact at variance with the accepted
theories. Such facts, when observed, have usually not been published,
and when published they have either been ignored or explained away in
some more or less plausible manner. The management of this magazine
wishes to make it a medium for the publication of such facts, which,
it may safely be asserted, are known to every, ophthalmologist of any
experience, and which, if they had received proper consideration,
would long ago have led us out of the blind alley in which we are now
languishing.

While I think it may be truthfully said that many of my methods are
new and original, other physicians, both in this country and in
Europe, have cured themselves and others by treatment without glasses.
Lay persons have done the same.

In The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, Oliver Wendell Holmes
published a very remarkable case of the cure of presbyopia.

"There is now living in New York State," he says, "an old gentleman
who, perceiving his sight to fait immediately took to exercising it on
the finest print, and in this way fairly bullied Nature out of her
foolish habit of taking liberties at five-and-forty, or thereabouts.
And now this old gentleman performs the most extraordinary feats with
his pen, showing that his eyes must be a pair of microscopes. I should
be, afraid to say how much he writes to the coinpass of a half-dime,
whether the Psalms or the Gospels, or the Psalms and the Gospels, I
won't be positive."(5)

An officer in the American Expeditionary Forces, whose letter is
published elsewhere, wrote to me about a year, ago that he has cured
himself of presbyopia, and after half a lifetime of misery was
entirely free from eye discomfort. There must be many more of these
cases, and we want to hear of them.

(1)Havard: Manual of Military Hygiene for the Military services of
United States, third revised edition 1917, p. 195.
(2) Report of the Provost Marshal General to the Secretary of War on
the First Draft under the Selective Service Act, 1917.
(3) Standards of Physical Examination for the Use of Local Boards,
District Boards and Medical Advisory Boards under the Selective
Service Act, Form 75
(4) Second Report of the Provost Marshal General to the Secretary of
War on the Operations of the Selective Service System to December
20,1918.
(5) Everyman's Library, 1908, pp. 166 and 167...]

- W.H. Bates, July 1919