New light on the eyes E-Book

R. Brooks Simpkins

• Herausgeber: David De Angelis
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Today, millions of men, women, and children, throughout the World, depend upon glasses. To the very many who ask, as did the Author thirty years ago, when he too was very shortsighted, `need such things be?' this book is of outstanding interest. Written in simple words for the laity, who are entitled to an understanding of their eyes, this book is also of profound importance to the ophthalmic and optical professions. It solves many of the problems of why eyes, normal at birth, develop refractive errors. It also introduces methods for the prevention of Cataract and Glaucoma, as well as rational treatment of these diseases.

The universal prescription of glasses to-day is based upon an 'hundred years old' theory that astigmatism is congenital, that shortsighted eyes are permanently too long, and longsighted eyes too flat, and that all adjustments of focus for near vision depend solely upon the small natural lens inside the eye incessantly changing its curvature and strength. In contradiction, however, the Author has proved, and depicts, with the aid of simple diagrams, that astigmatism is caused by irregular muscular tension on the pliable eyeball, and that normal eyes involuntarily lengthen to produce 'natural shortsight' for near vision, automatically return to an 'at rest' condition for distance vision, and arc mechanically capable of flattening for extreme distance vision or very longsight.

These natural processes, and their activation, are simply explained, and clearly indicate that developed irregular shapes of the eyes are capable of correction, and are not static unless so maintained by the wearing of glasses. Methods of scientific correction, evolved by the Author and named 'Oculopathy', are briefly indicated. The Author demonstrates that irregular muscular tensions, productive of refractive errors, also largely contribute to the development of Cataract and Glaucoma.

Leseprobe

New light on the eyes

Revolutionary and scientific discoveries which indicate extensive reform and reduction in the prescription of glasses and radical improvement in the treatment of diseases such as cataract and glaucoma

R. Brooks Simpkins

LONDON - VINCENT STUART LTD

FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1958 BY VINCENT STUART PUBLISHERS LTD 55 WELBECK STREET LONDON

1st digital edition 2016 by David De Angelis

Table of Contents

An Autobiographical Introduction

- 1 How We See

- 2 How Our Eyes Work

- 3 How Our Eyes Focus

- 4 Glasses

- 5 Cataract and Glaucoma

- 6 Visible Ray Therapy of the Eyes

- 7 Some Notes on Oculopathy

Suggested readings

Important Note: The visible rays of the electromagnetic-spectrum, described in chapter 6 of this book, are a natural medicine for the eyes, and, as proved by research work in other fields, for other organs and parts of the body. These visible rays must not be confused in any way with ultra-violet and X-rays, and atomic radiation.

Dedicated To

THE MILLIONS OF MY FELLOW HUMAN BEINGS-CHILDREN AND MEN AND WOMEN OF ALL AGES

The Author would like to record his thanks to R. H. Ward, novelist and playwright, for his great help in editing this book

Disclaimer:

The medical information on this book is provided as an information resource only, and is not to be used or relied on for any diagnostic or treatment purposes. This information is not intended to be patient education, does not create any patient-physician relationship, and should not be used as a substitute for professional diagnosis and treatment.

Please consult your health care provider, before making any healthcare decisions or for guidance about a specific medical condition. The author, publishers and distributors of this book disclaims responsibility, and shall have no liability, for any damages, loss, injury, or liability whatsoever suffered as a result of your reliance on the information contained in this book. The publishers and distributors do not endorse specifically any test, treatment, or procedure mentioned on the book.

An Autobiographical Introduction

WHEN I was a little boy, I had very good sight, or what is regarded as normal sight for a child, but small matters

arising in childhood often play big parts in our lives.

In those days we wore our best suits on Sundays, and were not allowed to play weekday games. Instead we had to go to Church for both the morning and the evening services. But Church was boring, except when one could let oneself go in singing a militant hymn such as 'Fight the good fight with all thy might', and the sermons bored me so excessively that Sunday after Sunday I amused myself with the visual trick of placing the face of the parson in the pulpit in the middle of a memorial plaque on the other side of the chancel. Of course I did not know then that I was deliberately forcing my eyes outwards in a divergent squint, but one Sunday after coming out of Church my sight did not seem to be quite as clear as usual.

About this time it was decided that I was ready to leave the Dame School which I had been attending since I was six, and pass on to the Grammar School. The master who conducted the entrance examination concluded it with a casual examination of my sight, using an ordinary distance test-chart, and requiring me to sort out some coloured wools. The result of this visual test was a letter to my father suggesting that my sight was not as good as it should be.

The Grammar School was a King Edward foundation which ranks to-day as a public school, but in those days, over fifty years ago, it was divided into three schools, lower, middle, and upper. There were about three hundred boys, and I became Simpkins Tertius since my two elder brothers also went to the school. So few boys wore glasses that those who did were called 'four-eyes'.

The main lower school classroom was long and narrow, but at the beginning of my first term I could read the blackboard at the front of the room from my place at the back, where, as a 1

new arrival, I shared a double desk with another boy. But the master who, except for specialised subjects such as Latin, chemistry and physics, controlled the lower school, did not like me any more than I liked him, and although at my Dame School I had proved to be a pretty good scholar in general subjects such as history, geography, and arithmetic, my new master so bullied me, and made me so afraid of him, that at the end of my first term under him I had to sit in the front row of desks to be able to see the blackboard at all; and I can well imagine that the same sort of thing still happens to boys and girls to-day.

So I was given my first pair of glasses. I do not know how much was then known of the neurology of vision, but to-day it is an established fact that 'nerves', fear and anxiety, affect the sight, though there are few indications that these factors are considered, even now, before glasses are prescribed for children and young people. And having to wear glasses had certain unhappy effects on me. I could read the blackboard, it is true, but glasses destroyed my zest for games, and gave me a sense of inferiority.

Again I wonder how many thousands of young boys and girls there are to-day whose minds are being affected in this way; for the slightest sense of inferiority inhibits potential accomplishment in many aspects of life.Whatever his physical prowess, a boy or young man, instead of unhesitatingly going to the fore, stands back for fear of breaking the glasses without which he cannot see clearly or quickly. However good-looking a girl may be, glasses mar her beauty, and many girls and young women, to my own knowledge, choose the limitations of indifferent sight rather than spoil their appearance. Many of my women patients who have overcome the need for glasses have told me with delight that now they are able to buy hats and dresses to suit their faces instead of their glasses.

The fact is that my actual need as a boy was not glasses, but, under instrumental guidance, a scientific correction of the disturbance of the normal muscular control of my eyes which I had unwittingly started by playing visual games with the parson's face and the memorial plaque in Church, and which disturbance was later aggravated by my fear of my class-master. But instead of receiving this rational treatment, of which admittedly little was known then, I was condemned to a lifelong dependence on glasses which periodically were made stronger and stronger; or rather I should have been had I not, twenty-seven years later, thrown my glasses into a drawer, determined to end the misery they were, and to end it not only for myself, but also for my fellow human beings.

I have often wondered what would be the state of my eyes and sight to-day, had I not done this. Is life just a chaotic series of chances, or is there a plan for each one of us? Perhaps this is a question which we cannot finally answer, but at least we mortals try to plan the early lives of our children in such manner as to give them as good chances as possible, and at least it is certain that many of the little things in life prove to be signposts to the observant. Thus it is my hope that some who read this book may later be able to say that, although they picked it up 'quite by chance', it gave them new hope for their eyes or their children's eyes. However that may be, I have written it for the information of those who are not satisfied with the present state of things where the treatment of the eyes is concerned.

But to continue my own story. At the age of nineteen, I lay for many weeks with both legs completely paralysed as a result of poliomyelitis, and it was then that I first conceived the idea of overcoming my own shortsight and astigmatism. It was, for the time being, only a nebulous idea, and presently it was submerged in the tolerably successful fight to overcome my paralysis sufficiently to enable me to lead a full and normal life. Little was known of polio in this country in those days, and weighty, though kindly, medical advice was neither encouraging nor helpful, so I had to find out for myself how to walk again.

Meanwhile, I was, before I fell ill, one of the earliest territorials, and I should, I suppose, have been an Old Contemptible in the first world-war, had I not been given my full military discharge in 1912. Yet such is the way things fall out that, but for this, I might never have had the chance to do research-work on the eyes.

In my twenties I became an accountant and public company secretary, the possessor of a conventional diploma of qualification by examination, which entitled me to exhibit a brass plate, s

and accept articled pupils. But the last ophthalmic surgeon whom I consulted (over thirty years ago now ), after prescribing a further increase in the strength of my glasses, suggested that I should seek other means of livelihood for the sake of my eyes. This was the same specialist who, years before, had advised my father to take me away from school at the age of fifteen, so that my eyes could be rested from study for at least six months. Perhaps he was an alarmist; I have studied all my life.

And perhaps it was a coincidence that, about the time I was thus advised to give up my profession, a friend of mine celebrated his presidency of a certain association by giving a garden-party, one of the attractions at which was a well-known clairvoyant. This man, gifted with the power of seeing things not present to the senses, startled me by asking me whether I knew that I had a job of 'social reform' to do, and became quite cross with me when I told him that all I knew was that I was a company secretary. Quite cross with him in turn, I insisted that he tell me the nature of this work of reform for which he said I was destined. Very quietly he replied that he could not do so; he could only tell me that I should start the work in my late thirties. He told me many other things. I could not scoff at him. He had never met me before, yet he knew so much about me that it was almost as though he was referring to an indexed plan. I was then in my early thirties.

My life continued unchanged for a year or two, however, during which time I met another clairvoyant whom I had never seen before, and have not seen since. She told me that I should shortly encounter an old friend 'from over the water', who would bring me into contact with something of a scientific nature, and that this would play a very big part in my life. A little later, in one of the busy main streets in Birmingham, I was hailed by an old school-friend who had just returned from America.

He was an interesting and clever fellow. He had wanted to be a doctor but his father had wanted him to be an engineer, and would not relent. Neither would my friend. One day he walked into his father's study wearing the peaked cap and uniform of a taxi-driver, and said, 'All right, Dad, you've won. I am now an engineer—at least of sorts.' But later an aunt left him a few thousand pounds, and this enabled him to go to the United States and graduate in his selected branch of medicine. It was this old friend 'from over the water' who lent me a book on the eyes by the late Dr W. H. Bates of New York. This book studied with avidity, and it induced me to start experimenting on my own badly shortsighted eyes. I was still a company secretary, but my researches into the way in which the eyes work had begun.

It was this same friend who also introduced me to visible ray therapy by demonstrating to me its efficacy as a treatment for certain conditions of the body. We frequently had lunch together, and one day when I called at his consulting-room to collect him, I was not feeling well. He just looked at me, then told me to go into his treatment-room and strip off. For the next twenty minutes he subjected my naked torso to what appeared to me (in my then ignorance) to be a powerful yellow ray, which made my skin appear golden all over. After this treatment I felt remarkably better. I did not realise then that I was destined later to evolve the method of visible ray therapy of the eyes which is described further on in this book.

What is known as the Bates System of eye-training has for many years been widely known. I wrote to Dr Bates myself, and received an encouraging reply, and for some time afterwards, while I was practising his methods on my own eyes, I received particulars of some of his current case-records. He was a very honest man, and admitted that he did not know why some of his patients were enabled to see better by (for instance) looking sideways. During the first world-war, snipers often found that they could see further and more clearly after looking upwards and inwards into the peaks of their hats, while one of the first discoveries I made was that I saw better immediately after looking at the point of a pencil three inches, or even less, from my eyes. There were already, in fact, several little signposts which indicated that the external muscles of the eyes influence their focus; and in after years a number of my patients demonstrated to me little tricks of their own devising which enabled them to see better for a moment or two.

Meanwhile, I obtained a slight improvement in my own sight by practising the Bates method. Then I asked a friendly

optician to test me for a small reduction in the strength of my glasses. He thought I was quite mad, however, and when six months or so later I went to him again, and asked for a further reduction, he consented, but with much shrugging of his shoulders. And then I got stuck. For all my efforts, I was unable to obtain further improvement in my sight, which was still bad, while my glasses were unpleasantly thick in appearance and tiresome to wear.

Perhaps it was all part of the plan to which my clairvoyant advisers seem to have had access, but now there happened, out of the blue, a complete upheaval of my humdrum life as an accountant and company secretary. Well nigh every circumstance and condition of my existence changed so rapidly that it was as if a tidal wave had swept me off my course, leaving me for a time floundering in a sea of uncertainty as to what new course to set. Then at last I began to remember much that I had forgotten, and tried to find the plan indicated by the little things which, as we all tend to do, I had ignored in my preoccupation with my own ideas of what my life should be.

For instance, I remembered such odd little occurrences as the following. As a young man I took a cold bath every morning, and I often noticed that, immediately after my nervous system had received this tonic, I could momentarily see so clearly without my glasses as to enable me to count the pears on an espalier two gardens away. I began now to ask why, if I could do this momentarily, I could not do it all the time. One evening just after dinner, too, I was polishing my glasses when someone said something so funny as to throw me into a paroxysm of laughter, in the midst of which I found to my amazement that I could see all the faces and objects round me quite clearly though my glasses were still in my hands. There was also the occasion when, after being prepared for the removal of my appendix, and wheeled supine into the operating-theatre, I was very surprised to find how clear to me were my unusual surroundings, despite the absence of my glasses. These departures from the rule indicated not only that the motor-nerves of the eyes might be involved, but several possible lines of enquiry.

Thereafter I decided to devote myself wholly to finding out how the eyes really work, and what are the real reasons why shortsight, longsight, and astigmatism develop in eyes which, in the absence of disease, are normal at birth. I wanted to find out these things, as I have said, not merely for myself but for all the rest of my fellow human beings: I had begun my work of reform. It was now, realising that the sort of research I had in mind could only be done by someone willing to employ his own eyes for an unknown number of experiments over an equally unknuw. n number of years, that I finally took my glasses off my face;.nor have I worn any since for any purpose other than that of experiment.

I had no medical training, and I knew that I must acquire not only a sufficient knowledge of anatomy and physiology, but of many other subjects as well. But apart from the fact that I could not afford it, I had no wish to go through the ordinary orthodox curriculum of study, because I saw that I should thus aoquire many of the fixed ideas of my professorial tutors, and I wanted neither to be deceived by such tutors nor to deceive myself. I wanted instead to find out the truth, or at least to be free to seek the inspiration which could lead me in the paths of true discovery.

The early stages of this research-work were somewhat grim. My sight was very bad, and I had to hold the text-books I was then studying as close as five or six inches from my nose. Out of doors, and without the glasses I had cast aside, my shortsighted astigmatism was so bad that a single car approaching appeared to be two or three cars, and I could not tell which was the real one until it was dangerously close to me. I spent many hours at the cinema, sitting at different distances from the screen, which was so blurred that I could not distinguish a street from a river, or a horse from a cart. At home, in conjunction with studying, I began delineating the eyes, and their many component parts, on my drawing-board in much the same way as an engineer draws the component parts of a machine. Indeed it was the only way; and as far as I knew it was the first time the complexities of the visual mechanism had been approached as engineering problems.

I was very hard up at this time, and lived in a ground-floor front bed-sitting room. A working woman occupied the ground-floor back, and we shared a pantry, the kitchen, and the scullery. She too had known difficult and troubled times in her life, as indeed had our mutual friends, a man and his wife, who occupied the top two floors of the house. When occasion demanded we lent one another packets of tea. I was lucky to find such friendly quarters in my poverty, which was such that I did my own shopping and cooking, and darned my own socks. One important thing was that the kitchen I shared provided me with a workshop in which I could make experimental instruments. In those days Woolworth's was still a store where nothing cost more than sixpence, and there I was able to buy cheap tools which served very well, strips of brass normally intended for curtain fittings, odd bits of wood and screws, nuts and bolts.

Those were very busy days for me, made happier than they might otherwise have been by the excitement of exploration and discovery, and by the sense of doing something which might well prove worthwhile. But I was not of course setting out to become a pathologist in the sense of the ophthalmic surgeon, for I had not thought, in those early days, of my researches as saving the many they have since saved from operations for cataract and other diseases of the eyes. I was merely seeking to find out how the visual mechanism really worked.

In this connexion I found the orthodox text-books confusing, if only because, at so many points where I expected their highly qualified authors to go further, they left off. This convinced me that the mechanism of the eyes had not yet been fully explored, and certainly not as an engineering problem, though of recent years both osteopathy and physiotherapy have come very much to the fore, while their practitioners may be said to be engineers of the body and limbs, whose patients benefit in a manner which no other method of treatment could possibly accomplish.

By this time I had myself performed many different kinds of eye-exercises. Some of these had made me see better for a short while, but others had made me see worse again. So it became apparent that eye-exercises required to be scientifically understood and applied, and that a particular exercise which was good for shortsight was not good for longsight, and viceversa. This discovery suggested that there must be a mechanical relationship between shortsight and longsight, and I set about trying to understand it.

The first instruments I invented simply guided the movements of the eyes in all directions. The exercises I did in conjunction with them proved to be very strengthening to the muscles of my own eyes, and my sight started to improve again. But although the movements of the eyes thus provided for were natural movements, and satisfactory so far as they went, they did not prove that both eyes were really focusing the moving object of fixation, even though both eyes appeared to be following it. This was an important discovery, in that it suggested a reason why those who had conscientiously performed eye-exercises hitherto had not obtained better results, and it led me to the next step. This was a simple device consisting of a disc with a hole in it through which both eyes had to look in order to see a black spot in the centre of a smaller disc set at some distance behind the first; this distance could be varied by a screw adjustment. The device was so constructed that it could be moved backwards and forwards along the twenty-inch length of a metal rod mounted on a stand. As my eyes followed the device moving to and fro in front of my eyes I saw two holes overlapping each other, thus creating an ellipse, in the centre of which was the black spot, which was as it should be. But if I saw only one hole, and no ellipse, then I knew that one of my eyes was not working properly. I was making real progress. My sight began to improve more rapidly, and doing without glasses became less of a torment.

Of course at any moment I could have put on my old glasses again, or obtained a weaker pair, but I knew that to do so would only hinder my progress. Naturally, in later years, and in all save very mild cases of defective vision, I treated my patients more rationally by prescribing for them progressively weaker glasses, so that they could carry on with their daily jobs until they could conveniently and comfortably do without glasses altogether. But my daily job at this time was to use my own eyes for research, and during this period I shared much of the sad experience of those whose sight is so bad that even stronger glasses do not enable them to see better.

I called this new device the Central Fixator. When I began to use it I could only see the black spot clearly six or seven inches from my eyes, but gradually I became able to see it further and further away, and as I did so it seemed that I could feel the external muscles of my eyes gripping more tightly. I was overcoming the slackness which I had first involuntarily induced when I played visual games in Church, as a boy, and had later had confirmed by the first glasses I was given, and had later still progressively aggravated by the stronger and stronger glasses I had worn over a period of twenty-seven years. I had begun to make far-reaching discoveries, though I did not then understand what they implied. For the time being, I merely went on and on, at times almost desperately.

My friends now became interested in what I was doing, even though they still thought it mad of me to have given up a profession which would eventually have earned me a substantial income. Some of these friends were longsighted and wore glasses for reading only, and I found that a few minutes' exercising of their eyes with the Central Fixator immediately enabled them to see better, and even to read better, without their glasses. So here was proof, since my own sight was short, that there is a mechanical relationship between shortsight and longsight. This discovery contradicted the orthodox ideas, which are that shortsight mainly arises from the eye becoming longer from back to front than it should be, and that a long-sighted eye is flatter in curvature than it should be. (These conditions are technically termed axial myopia and axial hypermetropia respectively. )

By now, too, my astigmatism had so much improved that I no longer saw as two or three cars a single car coming towards me. (Astigmatism is the condition in which the front of the eye, or the cornea, is irregularly curved, and is thus faulty as the first or outer lens of the eye.) Evidently, therefore, the external muscles of the eyes played a part in the production of astigmatism. This discovery again contradicted the orthodox teaching which says that astigmatism is congenital in origin.

At about this time I chanced to come across a little book on colour therapy; though it did no more immediately than suggest to me a possible field for exploration. It was quite simple, and not a scientific work, but it reminded me that my old school friend who had returned from America had 'dosed' my torso with a yellow ray which seemed to do me good at the time. So I began to wonder what benefits the eyes might not derive from the different wavelengths of the electro-magnetic spectrum, which wavelengths our eyes recognise as differently coloured rays. I decided to find out, and accordingly made a device which was in fact the prototype of the Fixoscope, fully described in a later chapter on visible ray therapy of the eyes.

Meanwhile, I did not know anything about these rays (but again I had my own eyes upon which to experiment) and I could not read the subject up because there did not appear to be any text-books devoted to colour ray therapy in particular, while standard works on physics of course explained the electromagnetic spectrum only in terms of pure physics.

However, from a firm of manufacturing chemists I managed to obtain some red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet filter glass, though there was no indigo to be had, and this firm kindly cut the glass into discs of the size I wanted, and mounted them so that they could be used in an instrument I had made. The design of this instrument was almost entirely a matter of common-sense experiment. Having two eyes, I mounted two sections of brass tubing, setting them the width of my eyes apart, on the top of a wooden container in which were two dry batteries. At one end of the tubes I fitted eyepieces, and at the other end cut slots to hold the filters; and behind the filters, and enclosed in the tubes, I fitted two 2.5 volt fiashlamp bulbs. But even with electric light of such low voltage, I was thrilled to notice the immediate effects, on my eyes and sight, of the different wavelengths of indirect electricity which each colour-filter mediated. My eyes felt both stimulated and soothed, and my sight was clearer for quite a time afterwards. Those of my friends who submitted to this treatment of their eyes were likewise aware of pleasant after-effects.