Color blindness : remarks / by B. Joy Jeffries at the twenty-ninth annual meeting of the board of the supervising inspectors of steam vessels.

  • Jeffries, B. Joy, 1853-
Date:
[1881]
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Color blindness : remarks / by B. Joy Jeffries at the twenty-ninth annual meeting of the board of the supervising inspectors of steam vessels. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by UCL Library Services. The original may be consulted at UCL (University College London)

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    specialists who had not become practically acquainted with it. There- fore I have been and am called upon for advice and explanation by medical officers and others whose official duties interest them, directly or otherwise, in the detection of color-blindness. Sucl} advice and explanations I have always given freely to the best of my ability, and have allowed no sacrifice of time or money to prevent me from respond- ing to each and every call to talk, to lecture, to explain, to answer inquiry by letter, or to appear before interested authorities, as the legislative railroad committees of Massachusetts and Connecticut, and the Naval Committee of Congress, and finally before many scientific societies. Especially have I felt it my duty to assist those in authority in understanding the subject before making rules and regulations governing visual defects and color-blindness. Thus it is that I come before this board at my own expense, stimulated only with a desire that, so far as I can make clear, they may be able to protect the com- munity from the hidden danger of defective sight, by discriminating rules based upon the practical facts of scientific observation. The Supervising Inspector-General says, in his annual report, that the rules in reference to color-blindness '^were the most important, probably, ever adopted by the board. i^Tow, the necessity of physical examination of soldiers was finally recognized by the community during the war. The crystallization, so to speak, of society in tliis country which has since so rapidly followed, has of necessity led to the required physical examination of various classes in civil life, and has naturally often met with great opposition on the part of those subjected to it. Sympathy is always with the defective i)erson, as amongst us the rights of the community are nearly universally sacrificed to those of the individual. This is, of course, a potent cause of the difficulty of pro- tecting the community by laws which render physical examinations necessary. The railroad committee of the legislature of Massachusetts told me, when I was arguing before them, that I never should succeed in mak- ing them oculists. But since they, as any body of the laity, would not accept or act upon the opinion and testimony of professional experts un- challenged, I had to consume valuable time in explaining to them some of the laws of form and color-perception, without a recognition of which it is impossible to understand even the general bearings of this subject of of defective vision from poor eyesight or color-blindness. Your board, therefore, must permit Ine to draw their attention to some of the con- ditions of our sense of sight and color, which bear so directly on what now concerns us. Through the eye we receive two impressions, namely,/orm and color. These are very distinct, and not at all necessarily connected. The com- plex arrangement of the internal part of the human eye, by which it resembles perfectly a camera ohscura, is necessary in order that a sharply- defined picture of external objects should be received on our retina. The slightest congenital or pathological change from a normal condi- tion causes imperfect vision. ]Now, this is not the case with reference to color. The curves of the refracting media of the eye may be very untrue, the media themselves not transparent, and yet the impression of color may be quite perfect. A person so blind with cataract as to be only able to tell where the window is, may be able, if not color-blind, to distinguish quite delicate or i)ale shades of color. Through a ground- glass window we can readily see the color of a signal-light, though we