In preventing pediculosis and infection of the eye vigilance and cleanliness are indispensable. After the diseases are advanced, after the germ colonies have taken title, some antiseptic or germ killer more violent than water is needed,—kerosene for the hair or strong green oil soap; for the eye, only what a physician prescribes.
CHAPTER VII[ToC]
EYE STRAIN
Wherever school children's eyes have been examined, from six to nine out of thirty are found to be nearsighted, farsighted, or otherwise in need of attention. A child is dismissed from school for obstinately declaring that the letter between c and t in "cat" is an o; "a pupil in her fourth school year was recently brought to me by her teacher with the statement that she did unreasonably poor work in reading for an intelligent and willing child;" a boy is punished for being backward. These three cases are typical. Examinations showed that the first child was astigmatic and not obstinate; the boy had run a pin into one eye ten years before and destroyed its sight; while the second girl was found to be afflicted with diplopia, and in a friendly chat told the following story: "I very often see two words where there is only one. When I was a very little girl I used to write every word twice. Then I was scolded for being careless. So I learned that I must not say two words even when I saw them." As Miss Alida S. Williams, principal of Public School 33 in New York City, has in many articles and addresses freely illustrated from school experience, the art of seeing is acquired, not congenital, and every human being who possesses it has learned it.
The large proportion of children suffering more or less seriously from eye trouble has led many persons to suggest physical deterioration as the cause. Eye specialists, however, assure us that eye troubles are probably as old as man. Our tardiness in learning the facts regarding these troubles is due in part to the lack, until recently, of instruments for examining the eye and for manufacturing glasses to correct eye defects; in part, also, to the tendency of the medical profession, which I shall repeatedly mention, to explain disorders by causes remote and hard to find rather than by those near at hand.
About 1870 Dr. S. Weir Mitchell's attention was called "to the marked relief of headache, insomnia, and other reflex symptoms following the correction of optical defects by glasses." In 1874 and 1876 he wrote two articles that "impressed upon the general profession the grave significance of eye strain." Since that time, "in Philadelphia at least, no study of the rebellious cause of headache or of the obscure nervous diseases has ever been considered complete until a careful examination of the eyes has included them as a possible cause of the disturbance."
The new fact, therefore, is not weak eyes or strained eyes, but rather (1) an increase in the regular misuse of eyes by school children, seamstresses, stenographers, lawyers, etc.; and (2) the incipient propaganda growing out of school tests that show the relation of eye strain to headache, nervous diseases, stomach disorder, truancy, backwardness.