A CURIOUS DEFECT.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXII, Issue 929, 10 December 1910, Page 4

A CURIOUS DEFECT.

A peculiar vision abnormality in a Chester school child which causes the patient to view everything at right angles to its true position, is described by Dr Meredith Young, the chief school medical officer to the Cheshire County Council, in his annual report.

As the child’s vision was suspected of being adnormal, some test type was put before it, and he was asked to form the letters with his fingers. He promptly made the proper number of strokes, but they were all in the wrong direction. He was then made to draw the letters, and he drew the large capital E horizontal instead of perpendicular. On being told to draw a cat, he drew it standing on its’tail instead of its legs, and similarly he drew a ship standing on its bowsprit instead of its keel. “ In these cases,” a well-known eye specialist explained recently, “ the defect is not in the eye itself, but in the transmission of the image seen from the lining of the back of the eye to the brain. Normally, the image of any object we see is thrown on the retina in an inverted position, the rays which pass through the upper portions of the lens of the eye being deflected downward, and those passing through the lower portion being turned upward. Thus, if a lighted candle is held before the eye, in the image that falls on the retina the lighted end is downward.

1 “ When an image thus falls on the retina a set of ‘ nerve-mes-sages ’ are immediately sent up to the brain, telling us what the image is. At the same time the brain has learned once more to invert the already inverted image, so finally the mind receives a picture of an object in the true position of the object. “ This child presumably has some abnormality in the nervous structures which carry images from the back of the eye to the recognising part of the mind. There is no cure for the condition ; he will have to learn by experience that things which look horizontal to him are re ally vertical.”