The incidence and causes of blindess in England and Wales, 1948-1962 / Arnold Sorsby.

  • Great Britain. Ministry of Health.
Date:
1966
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: The incidence and causes of blindess in England and Wales, 1948-1962 / Arnold Sorsby. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    SCOPE OF PRESENT SURVEY Full reviews of the trends in the number of blind and in the causes of blindness during the three years 1948-50 and during the subsequent four years, 1951-54, have been given in two earlier monographs (Sorsby, 1953 and 1956). The first section of the present study records the findings for 1955 to 1962; this elaborates the brief accounts given in the relevant Annual Reports of the Chief Medical Officer of the Ministry of Health for 1955-61, The two earlier monographs (which covered a total of 53,052 blind certificates) were based on data recorded on the old form of certification, analysed by the clinical entities shown on that form. This classification is given in the master tables of those monographs and more fully elsewhere (Sorsby, 1950). The data on the clinical findings since 1955 have been recorded by a double entry which shows both the site of the lesion and its aetiology—a classification first recommended by the [American] National Society for the Prevention of Bhndness and adopted in its essential features in 1951 by the International Association for the Preven¬ tion of Blindness. The actual classification—shghtly modified in use—with the code numbers used in transcribing the clinical data on to record cards is shown in Table С in the Appendix. The data derived from the classification employed for the certificates in 1948-54 generally lent themselves to comparison with those derived from the more recent classification, though there were difficulties with several entries, such as optic atrophy and congenital defects in which the older classification failed to distinguish adequately between topography and aetiology. But the major aff'ections, such as 'senile' cataract, 'senile' macular lesions, glaucoma, myopic chorioretinal atrophy, presented no such difficulties. Exten¬ sive data are therefore available for a consecutive period of fifteen years and this unique material of 118,277 certificates analysed out of a total of 165,606 issued between April 1st, 1948 and December 31st, 1962 is used for an overall survey in the second section of this report and in the Discussion on both these sections. 1