Reason and Authority

Quote:

[...Reason and Authority

Some one - perhaps it was Bacon - has said: "You cannot by reasoning
correct a man of ill opinion which by reasoning he never acquired." He
might have gone a step farther and stated that neither by reasoning,
nor by actual demonstration of the facts, can you convince some people
that an opinion which they have accepted on authority is wrong. A man
whose name I do not care to mention, a professor of ophthalmology, and
a writer of books well known in this country and in Europe, saw me
perform an experiment upon the eye of a rabbit which, according to
others who had witnessed it, demonstrated beyond any possibility of
error that the lens is not a factor in accommodation. At each step of
the operation he testified to the facts; yet at the conclusion he
preferred to discredit the evidence of his senses rather than accept
the only conclusion that these facts admitted.

First he examined the eye of the animal to be experimented upon with
the retinoscope and found it normal, and the fact was written down.
Then the eye was stimulated with electricity, and he testified that it
accommodated. This was also written down. I now divided the superior
oblique muscle, and the eye was again stimulated with electricity.

The doctor observed the eye with the retinoscope when this was being
done and said, "You failed to produce accommodation." This fact, too,
was written down. The doctor now used the electrode himself, but again
failed to observe accommodation, and these facts were written down. I
now sewed the cut ends of the muscle together, and once more
stimulated the eye with electricity. The doctor said, "Now you have
succeeded in producing accommodation," and this was written down. I
now asked:

"Do you think that superior oblique had anything to do with producing
accommodation?"

"Certainly not," he replied.

"Why?" I asked.

"Well," he said, "I have only the testimony of the retinoscope. I am
getting on in years, and I don't feel that confidence in my ability to
use the retinoscope that I once had. I would rather you wouldn't quote
me on this."

While the operation was in progress, however, he gave no indication
whatever of doubting his ability to use the retinoscope. He was very
positive, in fact, that I had failed to produce accommodation after
the cutting of the oblique muscle, and his tone suggested that he
considered the failure ignominious. It was only after he found himself
in a logical trap, with no way out except by discrediting his own
observations, that he appeared to have any doubts as to their value.

Patients whom I have cured of various errors of refraction have
frequently returned to specialists who had prescribed glasses for
them, and, by reading fine print and the Snellen test card with normal
vision, have demonstrated the fact that they were cured, without in
any way shaking the faith of these practitioners in the doctrine that
such cures are impossible. A girl of sixteen who had progressive
myopia of such high degree that she was not allowed to read, and was
unable to go about on the streets without a guide, was assured by the
specialist whom her family consulted that her condition was quite
hopeless, and that it was likely to progress until it ended in
blindness. She was cured in a very short time by means of the methods
advocated in this magazine, becoming able to discard her glasses and
resume all the ordinary activities of life. She then returned to the
specialist who had condemned her to blindness to tell him the good
news, but, while he was unable to deny the fact that her vision was
normal without glasses, he said it was impossible that she would have
been cured of myopia, because myopia was incurable. How he reconciled
this statement with his former patient's condition he was unable to
make clear to her.

A lady with compound myopic astigmatism [1], suffered from almost
constant headaches which were very much worse when she took her
glasses off. Every week, no matter what she did, she was so prostrated
by eyestrain that she had to spend a few days in bed; and if she went
to a theatre, or to a social function, she had to stay there longer.
She was told to take off her glasses and go to the movies: to look
first at the corner of the screen, then off to the dark, then back to
the screen a little nearer to the center, and so forth. She did so,
and soon became able to look directly at the pictures without
discomfort. After that nothing troubled her. One day she called on her
former ophthalmological adviser, in the company of a friend who wanted
to have her glasses changed, and told him of her cure. The facts
seemed to make no impression on him whatever. He only laughed and
said, "I guess Dr. Bates is more popular with you than I am."

In some cases patients themselves, after they are cured, allow
themselves to be convinced that it was impossible that such a thing
could have happened, and go back to their glasses. A clergyman and
writer, aged forty-seven, who had worn glasses for years for distance
and reading, had what I should have considered the good fortune to be
very quickly cured. By the aid of his imagination he was able to relax
in less than five minutes, and to stay relaxed. When he looked at fine
print it appeared grey to him, and he could not read it. I asked him
if he had ever seen printer's ink. He replied, of course, that he had.
I then told him that the paragraph of printed matter which he held in
his hand was printed in printer's ink, and that it was black and not
grey. I asked him if he did not know and believe that it was black, or
if he could not at least imagine that it was black. "Yes," he said, "I
can do that"; and immediately he read the print. It took him only
about a minute to do this, and he was not more than five minutes in
the office. The cure was permanent, and he was very grateful-for a
time. Then he began to talk to eye specialists whom he knew, and
thereupon grew skeptical as to the value of what I had done for him.
One day I met him at the home of a mutual friend, and in the presence
of a number of other people he accused me of having hypnotized him,
adding that to hypnotize a patient without his knowledge or consent
was to do him a grievous wrong. Some of the listeners protested that
whether I had hypnotized him or not, I had not only done him no harm,
but had greatly benefited him, and he ought to forgive me. He was
unable, however, to take this view of the matter. Later he called on a
prominent eye specialist who told him that the presbyopia (old sight)
and astigmatism from which he had suffered were incurable, and that if
he persisted in going without his glasses he might do himself great
harm. The fact that his sight was perfect for the distance and the
near-point had no effect upon the specialist, and the patient allowed
himself to be frightened into disregarding it also. He went back to
his glasses, and so far as I know has been wearing them ever since.
The story obtained wide publicity, for the man had a large circle of
friends and acquaintances; and if I had destroyed his sight I could
scarcely have suffered more than I did for curing him.

Fifteen or twenty years ago the specialist mentioned in the foregoing
story read a paper on cataract at a meeting of the ophthalmological
section of the American Medical Association in Atlantic City, and
asserted that anyone who said that cataract could be cured without the
knife was a quack. At that time I was assistant surgeon at the New
York Eye and Ear Infirmary, and it happened that I had been collecting
statistics of the spontaneous cure of cataract at the request of the
executive surgeon of this institution, Dr. Henry G. Noyes, Professor
of Ophthalmology at the Bellevue Hospital Medical School. As a result
of my inquiry I had secured records of a large number of cases which
had recovered, not only without the knife, but without any treatment
at all. I also had records of cases which I had sent to Dr. James E.
Kelly of New York and which he had cured, largely by hygienic methods.
Dr. Kelly Is not a quack, and at that time was Professor of Anatomy in
the New York Post Graduate Medical School and Hospital and attending
surgeon to a large city hospital. In the five minutes allotted to
those who wished to discuss the paper, I was able to tell the audience
enough about these cases to make them want to hear more. My time was,
therefore. extended, first to half an hour and then to an hour. Later
both Dr. Kelly and myself received many letters from men in different
parts of the country who had tried his treatment with success. The man
who wrote the paper had blundered, but he did not lose any prestige
because of my attack with facts upon his theories. He is still a
prominent and honored ophthalmologist. and in his latest book he gives
no hint of having ever heard of any successful method of treating
cataract other than by operation. He was not convinced by my record of
spontaneous cures, nor by Dr. Kelly's record of cures by treatment;
and while a few men were sufficiently impressed to try the treatment
recommended, and while they obtained satisfactory results, the facts
made no impression upon the profession as a whole, and did not modify
the teaching of the schools. That spontaneous cures of cataract do
sometimes occur cannot be denied; but they are supposed to be very
rare, and any one who suggests that the condition can be cured by
treatment still exposes himself to the suspicion of being a quack.

Between 1886 and 1891 I was a lecturer at the Post Graduate Hospital
and Medical School. The head of the institution was Dr. D. B. St. John
Roosa. He was the author of many books, and was honored and respected
by the whole medical profession. At the school they had got the habit
of putting glasses on the nearsighted doctors, and I had got the habit
of curing them without glasses. It was naturally annoying to a man who
had put glasses on a student to have him appear at a lecture without
them and say ...

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