Biographic clinics v 1 1903 Author:George Milbry Gould Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VIII. THE DISCOVERY OF ASTIGMATISM AND EYE- STRAIN. Among the many minds fused in the personality of Thomas Young there were those of the physician... more » and the physicist. Astigmatism was discovered by the mind of the physicist, and great as was the discovery it is a pity that it was so. Many others, and independently of each other, soon rediscovered the fact, so that the world would not long have been without the knowledge of it. While we are proud that we owe the researches and the memoir,1 " On the Mechanism of the Eye,"2 to a physician, the fact that it sprang from the intellect of the nonmedical scientist is of tremendous significance. The optical and mechanical way of looking at astigmatism instituted by Young was carried on by Airy, Donders, Helmholtz, and their successors, and is to-day the certain and sole cause that many millions of people are needlessly enduring lives of intense suffering and wretchedness. To Young and to the youngest ophthalmologist, exceptinga relatively small number of Americans, the significance of astigmatism has been physiologic instead of pathologic, has related solely to optics and the increase of visual acuity instead of to disease, and the remote effects of morbid physiology. This strange and fatal prepossession at once came out in Airy, who discovered " abnormal astigmatism," that is, " astigmatism that interfered with vision," by which term there was an utter ignoring of the all-important truth that disease is nothing more than morbid physiology. All over the world socalled medical men practising ophthalmology as a specialty have the same conception of the matter, and everywhere the ignorant and greedy optician is criminally allowed to pursue his calling of using articles of the materia medica (spectacle lenses) which have as powerf...« less