The attention and intelligence shown by patients during examination
materially influences its results, and one should never hold the first
trial of vision to be conclusive. We must always remember, however, that
all conclusions drawn from visual acuteness become more unreliable in
proportion as the latter is slight. We must attend to some peculiar
difficulties in testing the vision of those who squint or we shall be
liable to make great mistakes. When testing the squinting eye,
particularly in children, it is not sufficient merely to cover the other
or to hold the hand over it, for they know how to bring the usual eye
into fixation by holding the head on one side or peeping between the
fingers; we must keep it carefully closed with a bandage.
It is still more frequently the case that visual acuteness is stated to
be less than it is in reality. The result of always using the better eye
for fixation is, that fixation is not learnt with the weaker one. Even
where there is no squint we see very frequently that in one-sided
hypermetropia the accommodation is only used in that proportion which
has become habitual to the emmetropic eye and does not therefore suffice
to produce clear retinal images, while good visual acuteness is obtained
by means of the correcting convex glasses. In the case of squinters
(even without difference of refraction) it happens very frequently that
the first statements as to the visual power are considerably below the
truth. Patients who assert that they can only read the largest print
with difficulty, frequently read smaller, and even the smallest type
without more trouble, and we must be careful to ascertain this at first.
Accurate reports are usually obtained more quickly by means of convex
glasses or eserine. In any case insufficient accommodation is, according
to this, one of the difficulties, but not the only one, which has to be
overcome before the squinting eye can be put into fixation. We can
understand that the innervation necessary for distinct vision can be set
aside even without loss of visual acuteness, just as we see the movement
of convergence disappear without the interni losing their capacity for
contraction.
In order to explain the relation between squint and defective vision,
we must first consider the question hitherto neglected, or what is
worse, answered with preconceived opinion, as to whether the same form
of defective sight which is so common in squint also occurs without
squint. No one doubts the existence of congenital amblyopia,
nevertheless it has received but little attention in the handbooks on
ophthalmology. Leber, for instance (in the well-known compilation, vol.
v), does not mention it at all.
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