Eyestrain (commonly called asthenopia) / by Ernest Clarke.

Ernest Clarke

Date:: 1892

Credit: Eyestrain (commonly called asthenopia) / by Ernest Clarke. Source: Wellcome Collection.

24/184 page 12

$Here, then, was eyestrain, the result of astigmatism and anisometropia, which was only just sufficient to produce megrim when the nervous system was below par. Frequency of Ocular Headache.—Stevens reported that in one hundred consecutive cases of chronic headache in which the eyes were examined, he cured sixty-one by correcting the ocular defects.^ Gould says that out of 1,500 cases in private practice he found 75 per cent, of all headaches, and 95 per cent, of sick headache, were due to eyestrain.^ Culver gives a detailed account of nineteen cases where headache was the most prominent symptom, and was relieved by treating the ocular defect. In one of them, a girl aged 13 years, the intense headaches were accompanied by actual vomiting,^ Marlow says that heterophoria is more certain to produce headache than ametropia. Out of a total of 215 cases ex- amined, 160 had headache (i.e., 74.4 per cent.), and out of these only twenty-eight had orthophoria, and only in one, were emmetropia and orthophoria both present. He found that astigmatism of all kinds with simple hyperphoria was the most potent in producing headache, and myopia with esophoria the least.^ Ellis, of California, in 200 cases of errors of refraction, found 46.5 per cent, suffering from headache, and of these 29 per cent, complained of frontal, brow, or temporal head- ache ; 21 per cent, general headache ; 13 per cent, neuralgic headache; and 12 per cent, sick headache.^ ' Functional Nervous Diseases, 1887, p. 48. 2 Oph. Rev., vol. X., p. 280. ^American Journal of Ophthalmology, vol. vi., p. 192 and 296. ^ Oph. Rev., vol. viii., p. 353. Neiv York Med. Jour., April 30, 1S92.$

Eyestrain (commonly called asthenopia) / by Ernest Clarke.

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