Een aantal citaten uit Perfect sight without glasses van William Horatio Bates over staar:
blz. 50: “When the lens has been removed for cataract the patient usually appears to lose his power of accommodation, and not only has to wear a glass to replace the lost part, but has to put on a stronger glass for reading. A minority of these cases, however, after they become accustomed to the new condition, become able to see at the near-point without any change in their glasses. The existence of these two classes of cases has been a great stumbling block to ophthalmology. The first and more numerous appeared to support the theory of the agency of the lens in accommodation; but the second was hard to explain away, and constituted at one time, as Dr. Thomas Young observed, the “grand objection” to this idea. A number of these cases of apparent change of focus.”
blz. 52: “For nearly three-quarters of a century the opinions of these masters have echoed through ophthalmological literature. Yet it is to-day a perfectly well-known and undisputed fact that many persons, after the removal of the lens for cataract, are able to see perfectly at different distances without any change in their glasses. Every ophthalmologist of any experience has seen cases of this kind, and many of them have been reported in the literature.”
blz. 73: “As has already been noted, the fact that after the removal of the lens for cataract the eye often appears to accommodate just as well as it did before is well known. Many of these cases have come under my own observation. Such patients have not only read diamond type with only their distance glasses on, at thirteen and ten inches and at a less distance, but one man was able to read without any glass at all. ”
blz. 89: “It has been demonstrated in thousands of cases that all abnormal action of the external muscles of the ; eyeball is accompanied by a strain or effort to see, and that with the relief of this strain the action of the muscles becomes normal and all errors of refraction disappear. The eye may be blind, it may be suffering from atrophy of the optic nerve, from cataract, or disease of the retina; but so long as it does not try to see, the external muscles act normally and there is no error of refraction. This fact furnishes us with the means by which all these conditions, so long held to be incurable, may be cured.”
blz. 111: “The strain that produces an error of refraction is not the same as the strain that produces a squint, or a cataract, or glaucoma, or amblyopia, or inflammation of the conjunctiva4 or of the margin of the lids, or disease of the optic nerve or retina. All these conditions may exist with only a slight error of refraction, and while the relief of one strain usually means the relief of any others that may coexist with it, it sometimes happens that the strain associated with such conditions as cataract and glaucoma is relieved without the complete relief of the strain that causes the error of refraction.”
blz. 122: “Not only do all errors of refraction and all functional disturbances of the eye disappear when it sees by central fixation, but many organic conditions are relieved or cured. I am unable to set any limits to its possibilities. I would not have ventured to predict that glaucoma, incipient cataract and syphilitic iritis could be cured by central fixation; but It is a fact that these conditions have disappeared when central fixation was attained.”
blz. 134: “Patients who succeed with palming from the beginning are to be congratulated, for they are always cured very quickly. A very remarkable case of this kind was that of a man nearly seventy years of age with compound hypermetropic astigmatism and presbyopia, complicated by incipient cataract. For more than forty years he had worn glasses to improve his distant vision, and for twenty years he had worn them for reading and desk work. Because of the cloudiness of the lens, he had now become unable to see well enough to do his work, even with glasses; and the other physicians whom he had consulted had given him no hope of relief except by operation when the cataract was ripe. When he found palming helped him, he asked:
“Can I do that too much?”
“No,” he was told. “Palming is simply a means of resting your eyes, and you cannot rest them too much.”
A few days later he returned and said:
“Doctor, it was tedious, very tedious; but I did it.”
“What was tedious?” I asked.
“Palming,” he replied. “I did it continuously for twenty hours.”
“But you couldn’t have kept it up for twenty hours continuously,” I said incredulously. “You must have stopped to eat.”
And then he related that from four o’clock in the morning until twelve at night he had eaten nothings only drinking large quantities of water, and had devoted practically all of the time to palming. It must have been tedious, as he said, but it was also worth while. When he looked at the test card, without glasses, he read the bottom line at twenty feet. He also read fine print at six inches and at twenty. The cloudiness of the lens had become much less, and in the center had entirely disappeared. Two years later there had been no relapse.”
blz. 158: “In another case, that of a woman with high myopia complicated with incipi ent
cataract, the vision improved in a few days from 3/200 to 20/50. Instead of going gradually down the card, a jump was made from the fifty line to the ten line. The card was brought up close to her, and she was asked to look at the letter O at three inches, the distance at which she saw it best, to imagine that she saw a period on the bottom of it and that the bottom was the blackest part. When she was able to do this at the near-point, the distance was gradually increased until she became able to see the O at three feet. Then I placed the card at ten feet and she exclaimed:
“Oh, doctor, it is impossible! The letter is too small. It is too great a thing for me to do. Let me try a larger letter first.”
Nevertheless she became able in fifteen minutes to read the small O on the ten line at twenty feet.”
blz. 272: “In the same classroom, there had been a little girl with congenital cataract, but on the occasion of my visit the defect had disappeared. This, too, it appeared, was Emily’s doing. The school doctor had said that there was no help for this eye except through operation, and as the sight of the other eye was pretty good, he fortunately did not think it necessary to urge such a course. Emily accordingly took the matter in hand. She had the patient stand close to the card, where, with the good eye covered, she was unable to see even the big C. Emily now held the card between the patient and the light, and moved it back and forth. At a distance of three or four feet this movement could be observed indistinctly by the patient. The card was then moved farther away, until the patient became able to see it move at ten feet and to see some of the larger letters indistinctly at a less distance. Finally; after six months, she became able to read the card with the bad eye as well as with the good one. After testing her sight and finding it normal in both eyes, I said to Emily:
“You are a splendid doctor. You beat them all. Have you done anything else?” The child blushed, and turning to another of her classmates, said:
“Mamie, come here.”
Mamie stepped forward and I looked at her eyes. There appeared to be
nothing wrong with them.
“I cured her,” said Emily.
“What of ?” I inquired.
“Cross eyes,” replied Emily.
“How?” I asked, with growing astonishment.
Emily described a procedure very similar to that adopted in the other cases.
Finding that the sight of the crossed eye was very poor, so much so, indeed, that poor.”
blz. 303: “One case who has a partial cataract of the left eye could not see anything on the Snellen test card at twenty feet, and could see the letters only faintly at ten feet. Now she, can read 20/10 with both eyes together, and also with each eye separately; but the left eye seems, as she says, to be looking through a little fog. I could cite many other cases that have been benefited by central fixation, but this one is the most interesting to me.”
blz. 307/308: “Fifteen or twenty years ago the specialist mentioned in the foregoing story read a paper on cataract at a meeting of the ophthalmological section of the American Medical Association in Atlantic City, and asserted that anyone who said that cataract could be cured without the knife was a quack. At that time I was assistant surgeon at the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary, and it happened that I had been collecting statistics of the spontaneous cure of cataract at the request of the executive surgeon of this institution, Dr. Henry G. Noyes, Professor of Ophthalmology at the Bellevue Hospital Medical School. As a result of my inquiry I had secured records of a large number of cases which had recovered, not only without the knife, but without any treatment at all I also had records of cases which I had sent to Dr. James E. Kelly of New York and which he had cured, largely by hygienic methods. Dr. Kelly is not a quack, and at that time was Professor of Anatomy in the New York Post Graduate Medical School and Hospital and attending surgeon to a large city hospital. In the five minutes allotted to those who wished to discuss the paper, I was able to tell the audience enough about these cases to make them want to hear more. My time was, therefore, extended, first to half an hour and then to an hour. Later both Dr. Kelly and myself received many letters from men in different parts of the country who had tried his treatment with success. The man who wrote the paper had blundered, but he did not lose any prestige because of my attack, with facts, upon his theories. He is still a prominent and honored ophthalmologist, and in his latest book he gives no hint of having ever heard of any successful method of treating cataract other than by operation.”
Een ander artikel van Bates over Cataract, in het engels.