William Horatio Bates

“ A truth is strengthened by an accumulation of facts. A working hypothesis is proved not to be a truth if a single fact is not in harmony with it. The accepted theories of accommodation and of the cause of errors of refraction require that a multitude of facts shall be explained away. During more than thirty years of clinical experience, I have not observed a single fact that was not in harmony with the belief that the lens and the ciliary muscle have nothing to do with accommodation and that the changes in the shape of the eyeball upon which errors of refraction depend are not permanent. ”

“ Yet the eye not only overcame four and a half diopters of hypermetropia, but added six diopters of accommodation, making a total of ten and a half. It remains for those who adhere to the accepted theories to say how such facts can be reconciled with them. ”

“ The fact is that it sometimes produces myopia, or changes hypermetropia into myopia, and that it will produce both myopia and hypermetropia in persons over seventy years of age, when the lens is supposed to be as hard as a stone, as well as in cases in which the lens is hard with incipient cataract. Patients with eyes apparently normal will, after the use of atropine, develop hypermetropic astigmatism, or myopic astigmatism, or compound myopic astigmatism, or mixed astigmatism.2 In other cases the drug will not interfere with the accommodation, or alter the refraction in any way. ”