Eyestrain (commonly called asthenopia) / by Ernest Clarke.

Ernest Clarke

Date:: 1892

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

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$people. The nervo-muscular excitability of the Americans explains the enormous preponderance of asthenopia in the United States (see fig. i, p. 28). Thus we should expect to find that people with an unstable nervous system, who are emotional and easily excitable, prone to suffer from asthenopia if the conditions for it exist, whereas other individuals in a healthy mental and physical state, although perhaps suffering from a greater tendency to asthenopia, are yet able to ward it off. Again, the condition of life is an important factor ; Burnett says, Like nervous prostration, I think the asthenopia and headaches of heterophoria and ametropia is a disease developed largely by the American method of living.^ The individual who lives at high pressure, as our cousins over the Atlantic do, is a very likely subject for asthenopia. In these days of telephones and cables, when our business men do as much work in a day as our forefathers did in a week, we find an explanation of the increase of asthenopia with increase of civilisation. We then see that the symptoms of eyestrain are nervous phenomena, naturally most prone to make their appearance in a nervous age or in nervous people, and dependent upon either an abnormal use of, or an abnormal condition of the eyes. In a very interesting article on Eyesight in Schools, ^ Brudenell Carter published the results of the Philadelphia committee, who examined carefully the eyes of 2,596 children. Some very interesting statistics were obtained, showing the relation of asthenopia to the refraction of the eye. Perusal of the following table (fig. i) will show that the * Trans. Am. Oph. Soc, vol. vi., part i, p. 221. Pamphlet reprinted from Medical Times and Gazelle April 22 and May 2, 1885.$

Eyestrain (commonly called asthenopia) / by Ernest Clarke.

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