“
The Object Lessons series achieves something very close
to magic: the books take ordinary—even banal—objects
and animate them with a rich history of invention,
political struggle, science, and popular mythology. Filled
with fascinating details and conveyed in sharp, accessible
prose, the books make the everyday world come to life.
Be warned: once you’ve read a few of these, you’ll start
walking around your house, picking up random objects,
and musing aloud: ‘I wonder what the story is behind
this thing?’ ”
Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas
“
Come From and How We Got to Now
Object Lessons describes themselves as ‘short, beautiful
books,’ and to that, I’ll say, amen. . . . If you read enough
Object Lessons books, you’ll fill your head with plenty of
trivia to amaze and annoy your friends and loved ones—
caution recommended on pontificating on the objects
surrounding you. More importantly, though . . . they
inspire us to take a second look at parts of the everyday
that we’ve taken for granted. These are not so much
lessons about the objects themselves, but opportunities
for self-reflection and storytelling. They remind us that
we are surrounded by a wondrous world, as long as we
care to look.”
John Warner, The Chicago Tribune
“
In 1957 the French critic and semiotician Roland
Barthes published Mythologies, a groundbreaking
series of essays in which he analysed the popular
culture of his day, from laundry detergent to the face of
Greta Garbo, professional wrestling to the Citroën DS.
This series of short books, Object Lessons, continues
the tradition.”
Melissa Harrison, Financial Times
“
“
Though short, at roughly 25,000 words apiece, these
books are anything but slight.”
Marina Benjamin, New Statesman
The Object Lessons project, edited by game theory
legend Ian Bogost and cultural studies academic
Christopher Schaberg, commissions short essays and
small, beautiful books about everyday objects from
shipping containers to toast. The Atlantic hosts a
collection of ‘mini object-lessons’. . . . More substantive
is Bloomsbury’s collection of small, gorgeously
designed books that delve into their subjects in much
more depth.”
Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing
“
The joy of the series . . . lies in encountering the various
turns through which each of the authors has been
put by his or her object. The object predominates, sits
squarely center stage, directs the action. The object
decides the genre, the chronology, and the limits of
the study. Accordingly, the author has to take her cue
from the thing she chose or that chose her. The result is
a wonderfully uneven series of books, each one a thing
unto itself.”
“
“
Julian Yates, Los Angeles Review of Books
. . . edifying and entertaining . . . perfect for slipping in a
pocket and pulling out when life is on hold.”
Sarah Murdoch, Toronto Star
. . . a sensibility somewhere between Roland Barthes and
Wes Anderson.”
Simon Reynolds, author of Retromania: Pop Culture’s
Addiction to Its Own Past
iv
A book series about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
Series Editors:
Ian Bogost and Christopher Schaberg
Advisory Board:
Sara Ahmed, Jane Bennett, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen,
Johanna Drucker, Raiford Guins, Graham Harman,
renée hoogland, Pam Houston, Eileen Joy, Douglas
Kahn, Daniel Miller, Esther Milne, Timothy Morton,
Kathleen Stewart, Nigel Thrift, Rob Walker, Michele White.
In association with
Books in the series
Remote Control by Caetlin Benson-Allott
Golf Ball by Harry Brown
Driver’s License by Meredith Castile
Drone by Adam Rothstein
Silence by John Biguenet
Glass by John Garrison
Phone Booth by Ariana Kelly
Refrigerator by Jonathan Rees
Waste by Brian Thill
Hotel by Joanna Walsh
Hood by Alison Kinney
Dust by Michael Marder
Shipping Container by Craig Martin
Cigarette Lighter by Jack Pendarvis
Bookshelf by Lydia Pyne
Password by Martin Paul Eve
Questionnaire by Evan Kindley
Hair by Scott Lowe
Bread by Scott Cutler Shershow
Tree by Matthew Battles
Earth by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Linda T. Elkins-Tanton
Traffic by Paul Josephson
Egg by Nicole Walker
Tumor by Anna Leahy
Personal Stereo by Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow
Whale Song by Margret Grebowicz
Eye Chart by William Germano
Shopping Mall by Matthew Newton
Sock by Kim Adrian
Jet Lag by Christopher J. Lee
Veil by Rafia Zakaria
High Heel by Summer Brennan (forthcoming)
Souvenir by Rolf Potts (forthcoming)
Rust by Jean-Michel Rabaté (forthcoming)
Luggage by Susan Harlan (forthcoming)
Burger by Carol J. Adams (forthcoming)
Toilet by Matthew Alastair Pearson (forthcoming)
Blanket by Kara Thompson (forthcoming)
eye chart
william Germano
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc
N E W YO R K • LO N D O N • OX F O R D • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc
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USA
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www.bloomsbury.com
BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
First published 2017
© William Germano, 2017
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval
system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.
No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining
from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury
or the author.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Germano, William P., 1950Title: Eye chart / William Germano.
Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. | Series: Object lessons |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017003955 (print) | LCCN 2017006704 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501312342
(pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781501312328 (ePub) | ISBN 9781501312311 (ePDF)
Subjects: LCSH: Eye–Examination–History. | Vision–Testing–History. |
Visual perception–History. | Visual perception–Psychological aspects. |
Charts, diagrams, etc.
Classification: LCC RE26 .G47 2017 (print) | LCC RE26 (ebook) | DDC 612.8/4–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017003955
ISBN: PB: 978-1-5013-1234-2
ePub: 978-1-5013-1232-8
ePDF: 978-1-5013-1231-1
Series: Object Lessons
Cover design: Alice Marwick
Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
for Diane and Christian, clearly
“Can you read this?”
Ophthalmologist to patient.
(Anytime, anywhere.)
“Everyone is committed to the optical illusions of his
isolated standpoint.”
walter benjamin, one-way street
x
Contents
List of figures xiii
1 What can you see?
1
2 Reading stars, reading stones
13
3 How to choose eyeglasses (circa 1623)
4 The persistence of memory
5 Eleven lines, nine letters
6 Reading up close
77
7 Looking for trouble
8 Eye terror
103
9 Eye poetry
117
91
55
41
23
10 Optical allusions
11 The bottom line
Acknowledgments 155
Notes 157
Index 165
xii
Contents
129
147
LIST OF FIGURES
1.1
3.1
3.2
3.3
3.4
3.5
4.1
4.2
5.1
5.2
5.3
5.4
5.5
6.1
6.2
6.3
7.1
8.1
8.2
Herman Snellen’s carte de visite. 11
A 1920s optometer. 24
Uso de los antojos, title page. 28
Francis Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum, title page. 30
Testing image from Uso de los antojos. 32
Testing image from Uso de los antojos. 33
A sermon can test eyes, too. 47
The Küchler chart. 49
Testing with Egyptian Paragon. 67
The Landolt C eye chart. 69
Degas, The Fallen Jockey (detail). 71
The logMAR eye chart. 73
The Mayerle eye chart (1907). 75
A moment of Goethe in Jaeger’s test-types. 79
Testing vision with Schiller. 80
Jaeger, and Jaeger with music. 83
Mr. Magoo negotiates an unlikely eye chart. 100
The invisible man’s deathbed visibility. The Invisible
Man, dir. James Whale, 1933. 107
Superman fails an eye test. 109
9.1
George Herbert’s “Easter Wings”
tests many things, including eyes. 120
9.2 Mouse tail “stereotype plate” from Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland, a second issue
of the first edition of “Alice” photographed by
Jack Campbell-Smith for Oxford University Press.
Reproduced by permission. 125
10.1 Bottoms up. Shot glasses with diagnostic benefits.
Source: Restoration Hardware. 134
10.2 The Pi eye chart. 136
10.3 Urban geography as cultural eye test. 137
10.4 The most comforting eye chart
ever devised. 138
10.5 Message Snellen and optical understanding. 1936 or
1937. WPA Federal Art Project. 139
10.6 Evangelical Snellen. 140
10.7 Drunk Snellen. 141
10.8 Tattoo Snellen. “Ben Ross Davis,
New York 2016.” Photograph: William
Germano. 143
10.9 Inking belief in Snellen terms.
Photograph: Ina Saltz; artist: Anthony Morelli.
From Body Type 2: More Typographic Tattoos
by Ina Saltz. New York, Abrams Image, 2010. 144
10.10 Do-it-yourself Snellen. 145
10.11 Do-it-yourself Jaeger. 146
xiv
LIST OF FIGURES
11.1
11.2
11.3
11.4
11.5
Eye testing in a Sudanese village. Photo
courtesy of the World Health Organization.
© WHO/Didier Henrioud, 1975. 148
Snellen as an Indian public service announcement.
https://www.newswire.com/sankara-eye-hospitalunveils-world/198658 October 12, 2012. Accessed
June 5, 2016. Originally appeared
in the Times of India. 149
Eye-test posters. Tromsø, Norway.
Photograph: William Germano, 2016. 150
Snellen as graphic style. A gallery sign
in Ljubljana. Photograph: William Germano,
2014. 153
[Your answer here.] Image © Aled Lewis.
Used with permission of the artist. 154
LIST OF FIGURES
xv
xvi
1 What Can You
See?
At ten o’clock on the morning of May 13, 1885, at the (now
defunct) Pulte Medical College in Cincinnati, a meeting
of the Homeopathic Medical Society of Ohio was called to
order.
Helen Varner, the event’s secretary, subtitled her report
“An Interesting and Profitable Meeting.” Paper topics ranged
from the descriptive (the disposal of the dead in New
Orleans) and the diagnostic (a paper on breech delivery,
that was pleasingly delivered “in a softly modulated voice”)
to the weirdly pre-scientific (the probability of planetary
conjunctions causing storms on Earth).
There was debate on the subject of cremation. Was it
Christian? One speaker protested eloquently that without
interment of the body “there would have been no burial of
Christ nor Lazarus, no ‘Hamlet’ without the grave scene, no
‘Thanatopsis,’ no harrowing mourners.”
A busy day.
“Toward the end of the session,” Miss Varner continues,
“the bureau of O. and O. [Optometry and Ophthalmology]
contributed a paper on Ophthalmologic mistakes by Dr.
Phillips, who urged care in differential diagnosis. Glaucoma,
by Dr. Shell, followed by a recommendation of an eye chart,
by Dr. McDermott. I fancied there were many who were
disappointed at not hearing from Dr. McDermott. Few know
better how to electrify an audience than this gentleman.”1
We might still regret the absence of Dr. McDermott. A man
who could have electrified an audience even with a talk
recommending an eye chart is a man worth hearing.
What would he have shown a Cincinnati audience in
1885? Probably some version of Herman Snellen’s optotypes,
a simple graphic of sample letters devised in the Netherlands
in 1862. It would quickly become the gold standard of visual
testing.
E
For a hundred and fifty years it’s been the most successful
graphic yet devised for determining the acuity of vision.
Snellen’s eye chart, the Snellen chart—we don’t refer to
Snellen’s optotypes anymore—is so familiar that it seems
always to have been there.
Dr. McDermott’s audience may even have been hearing
eye chart as a new medical term; the Oxford English
Dictionary tells us that Miss Varner’s report of the event is the
earliest documented appearance of eye chart in the English
language.2 It stuck. From Utrecht to Cincinnati to the rest
2
eye chart
of the English-speaking world, we speak of eye charts, and
when we do we’re almost always talking about Snellen’s
handiwork or some version of it. It’s not even medicine’s
property anymore. Once just the name for a diagnostic tool,
eye chart has become part of popular culture’s toolkit, lending
its authority to graphic design and conceptual art.
The Snellen eye chart is a powerful if enigmatic thing.
I’ve worn glasses all my life, and so I’ve had to return to that
chart again and again; different doctors’ offices, different
versions of the Snellen chart, but always the same procedure.
In a modern, darkened space, the image revealed—after so
many years, a ceremony as much as an exam. For me, eye
charts are nocturnal creatures, like vampires and ghosts.
They belong in the dimness of the examining room. I had
mixed feelings when eye charts became a trope of graphic
design. That’s clever, I thought, the first time I saw a Snellen
diagram silk-screened on a T-shirt. But I wondered what it
was doing there.
Snellen and I have gone way past that point, so far in fact
that I’ve come back to the eye chart as an object I wanted to
think about in some detail. Who was Snellen? Where did eye
charts come from? How do they work? How did the graphic
we know become an icon of design? For that matter, when
did people begin connecting eyeglasses, which I knew were a
medieval invention, to tests for visual acuity?
The eye chart is a test, and just one of many. Doctors and
nurses test parts of us, inside and out, reporting to us what
they’ve discovered about good cholesterol or bone density
What Can You See?
3
or odd marks in odd places. The modern medical exam can
feel overwhelmingly passive. We obediently submit and our
bodies give up the secrets that even we ourselves may not
want to know. The eye exam is yet one more medical test
requiring obedient submission (do not move, look at my left
ear, do not blink), but one part of it—the eye chart—provides
a kind of relief from the control of medical authority. It’s the
rare test where—in a literal sense—you get to read the signs.
Familiar and unfamiliar, like many things around us, the
eye chart is something we don’t notice until we have to. This
isn’t especially surprising. How often do you see your eye
doctor? Once a year? That’s the frequency for which the eye
chart was designed to be seen, like a Christmas ornament or
an Easter egg. What’s different about the eye chart, however,
is that it’s not just an object to be seen but to be studied, and
it’s an object that is in itself all about noticing.
Scientific and non-scientific, clinical and symbolic, the eye
chart shows multiple faces. Like any other scientific tool, this
one communicates its findings as precisely as possible and in
a universal language of measurement. Facing us with its cool
display of letters, the eye chart is something more, too. It’s
not just a tool but a text—enigmatic, partially readable, and
ultimately illegible.
E
The visual document we know was configured by a twentyeight-year-old Dutch ophthalmologist. Herman Snellen’s
professional life was largely confined to Utrecht, where he
4
eye chart
had studied ophthalmology and worked as an assistant to
Franciscus Donders, founder of the Nederlandsch Gasthuis
voor Ooglijders (the Dutch hospital for eye disorders);
Snellen would succeed Donders as its head. As with many
medical innovators, it’s not the day-to-day treatment of
patients or scholarly papers for which Snellen would be
remembered, but for one instantly popular eye test.
Despite the Snellen diagram’s sudden fame and
continuing utility, the idea of an eye chart was not itself new.
For a quarter century before Snellen’s 1862 breakthrough,
there had been standardized printed material of various
kinds to test eyesight. At the same time that Donders
and Snellen were at work, visual testing was also being
explored by Eduard Jaeger, Snellen’s Austrian contemporary
and sometimes rival.
Snellen plus Jaeger: you probably think of the eye chart
only as the graphic arrangement of letters in a darkened
room and forget about the small handheld card with text
on it. “Hold this at your normal reading distance,” your
ophthalmologist might say, and you dutifully read off a patch
of text. That card is the second, participatory element in your
eye exam, and it’s about reading, not identifying. Eduard
Jaeger made this part of the protocol. While Snellen crafted
an ingenious mechanism for specifying vision strength at a
distance, Jaeger provided a tool for evaluating vision close in.
You may not think of Jaeger’s contribution, which seems so
ordinary as to escape attention, but when you go for an eye
check-up today you enter a world made possible by Snellen
What Can You See?
5
and Jaeger, whose contributions to diagnosis gave system to
the process of analyzing visual accuracy.
Nevertheless, today it’s still Snellen’s name we know best.
The young Dutch doctor who organized this set of symbols
became the unwitting father of a gesture in graphic design
that links the contemporary world to mid-nineteenthcentury ophthalmological practice. No graphic work in the
history of medicine is more easily recognizable than Snellen’s
eye chart.
E
The eye chart you know is a card or projection with
letters arranged from largest at the top to smallest at the
bottom. Universally recognized as a diagnostic tool for
assessing the acuity of a person’s vision, the eye chart
provides calibrations that can be shared among vision
professionals—the ophthalmologist or optometrist who
examines you, as well as the optician who grinds your
lenses. Like all good scientific tools, it promises accurate,
transferable data.
In the mid-twentieth century, however, the eye chart
began to take on a graphic and social life of its own. No
longer the thing you would see once a year on a visit to the
doctor’s office, the eye chart began to pop up everywhere—
in advertising, in cartoons, turning up on T-shirts and
postcards, toys and tchotchkes. Modern design has mined
the Snellen chart for its graphic ingenuity, disassembling and
repurposing it for humor, exhortation, satire, politics, and
6
eye chart
even devotional purposes. For the doctor it’s a diagnostic
tool. For us civilians it’s become a point of reference for other
graphics that, unlike Snellen’s cryptic arrangement, have
something to say.
In his late essay Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes wrote
that “photography is at the intersection of two quite distinct
procedures,” the chemical and the optical.3 Materials interact
and cause an image to emerge in a bath under a safelight as
silver particles adhere to paper. Physical and psychological
processes enable an image of something in the visible world
to reach the iris, the retina, the brain.
Like photography, the measurement of visual acuity also
occurs at the intersection of two quite distinct procedures.
As embodied in the Snellen eye chart and the Jaeger reading
card, these two procedures are both about forms of reading:
far vs. near, letters vs. text, symbols vs. narrative. Together
the two components make up a more elastic idea of an “eye
chart”—the catchy layout of Snellen’s letters and Jaeger’s
quiet display of text samples.
Eye chart: One of the many compounds for the word eye
recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary. You can compile an
eccentric list. What do you call the reflection of yourself that you
glimpse in another person’s eye? An eye baby. What do you call
a sense of ungrounded optimism based purely on how things
appear? Eye hope. The form eye-mindedness is an infrequent
term for visual memory. If you’re eye-set you’re trustworthy.
You won’t see well if you have an eye-pearl, which isn’t a gem,
unfortunately, but a cataract. An eyeseed is, surprisingly
What Can You See?
7
enough, actually a kind of seed, but it’s one which, when placed
in the eye, was once believed to bring about sympathetic magic
and remove foreign material from the body.
Diagnostic or playful, clinical or personal, the eye chart
functions both as a thing and as a syntactic arrangement.
That range means that we can think about the eye chart in
terms both of its history as a diagnostic tool and as a popular
form of information delivery. We might even do more and
consider how the eye chart, with its hierarchy and clear-cut
performance thresholds, invites us to ponder metrics and
standards and conventions, forms of legibility and invisibility,
and even ideas of the normal.
The precise measurement of vision shares objectives
with other modern projects: the expansion of literacy, the
invention of the telescope, the development of the modern
army, the ambitions of modern advertising, the poetry of
the everyday—all have connections to the eye test, and to
the eye chart that remains its graphic centerpiece. It’s always
been important for humans to know who in the group had
the best pair of eyes. Then in the experimental world of early
modernity, and again in the technological nineteenth century,
the goal of measuring visual acuity with some precision
becomes part of what we might call the project of the eye.
That project is optical. The eye chart works by playing a
trick on us: it takes things we can easily see—objects, words,
letters—and makes them difficult to distinguish. The figures
on the chart may be precise, but fuzziness is built into the eye
chart’s architecture.
8
eye chart
Form is as crucial to the eye chart as it is to dance or
grammar. A standard Snellen chart, for example, has eleven
lines of type. You’re not really supposed to be able to read
all eleven of them, though there are a few people who can,
but they fall outside that band of performance to which
we assign the categorical name average (and sometimes
normal). Reading through the whole thing isn’t the point.
As a diagnostic tool, the eye chart depends on uncertainty,
the presence of the border, the space between the sharp
and the fuzzy, the no-man’s-land between the clear and the
ambiguous. It’s the edge that the eye chart tests for.
How to describe the dynamic of the eye chart? In a
different context, the psychoanalytic critic Kaja Silverman
has used the phrase “the threshold of the visible world.” The
eye chart feels like a variant on that concept. It’s a graphic
world that represents, for diagnostic purposes, our visible
threshold.
Our eyes are us. Our windows, our points of contact, our
lifelong projects, the way the heart and the back and the gut
are lifelong projects. We point to computers and complain
of eyestrain, or we face the inevitable decline of vision with
age (presbyopia, which only sounds like what Presbyterians
see but simply means elderly vision). We learn to care for
our eyes. We learn about irregularities in the shape of the
eyeball and the difference in nearsightedness (myopia) and
farsightedness (hyperopia), those wonderfully old-fashioned
terms that sound as if they divide us into two easily contained
categories. We learn about astigmatism, that familiar
What Can You See?
9
condition where the shape of the cornea causes light to be
refracted improperly onto the retina. We learn about vision
impairment and forms of blindness, in all their complicated
variant states—loss of peripheral vision, the gaping hole in
the visual field called macular degeneration, and the different
ways in which we are affected by vision loss through age or
accident or at birth. The eye, the most wonderful and complex
of our sensory organs, is full of questions. As you face the eye
chart, though, the doctor reduces all those questions to one:
“What can you see?” So you start, row by row, until you reach
the point at which the world’s edges drop away and the image
dissolves into gray powder. In a moment, the doctor will ask
you to read the next line, which is the line you cannot read,
and the diagnostic moment will be reached.
Of course, the eye chart is only one piece of the eye exam,
and maybe not even the most important. What the doctor
sees within the eyeball could result in tougher news. Looking
inside the eye: that’s another secretive, internal medical
procedure, and at best it can only be narrated to us. There
are field tests to check the range of peripheral vision and
tonometry to measure the fluid pressure within the eyeball.
There are ways to measure the thickness and shape of the
cornea and to check for retinal tears. There are procedures
for determining the health of the optic nerve, and there are
ways to evaluate the ghostly detritus called floaters that drift
through the eyeball’s fluid center, crossing the visual field like
a shoal of squid. Yet none of these diagnostic procedures has
quite the mystery, and maybe the charm, of the eye chart on
10
eye chart
Figure 1.1 Herman Snellen’s carte de visite.
the other side of the examining room. Because the eye-chart
part of the exam is something different, something out there,
something slightly old-fashioned, something where you do
the narrating yourself.
Snellen died in 1908 at age seventy-three. Snellen’s carte de
visite shows the doctor, probably in his last decade, with the
eye chart in the lower right corner, as if it were his signature.
In effect, it was.
What Can You See?
11
12
2 Reading Stars,
Reading Stones
There was optical measurement long before there were
optical instruments, and there were eyeglasses before there
were eye charts.
In Jewish tradition, the day begins at evening, and twilight
is the critical boundary separating one yom from the next.
Evening is the dark beginning of the new day, officially
arriving when two stars can be seen. Today we can’t all
easily see the stars, and earth is doing its best to screen out
the heavens with light pollution. The pre-industrial desert
peoples may have missed out on industrialized modernity
but they had this advantage over us: skies were clearer. A
commonplace in the history of visuality says that in the
cloudless nights of the Arabian desert (the desert needn’t be
Arabian, but the skies had to be cloud-free), a man’s keenness
of sight could be measured by the rapidity with which he
could distinguish two stars. Is it true? It’s true enough. The
history of ocular measurement nicely marries precision to
myth. Even today, amateur stargazers can test their ability
to distinguish twin stars or find the bright fuzz of a nebula
or every component of a constellation. To look up is to test
one’s eyesight.
Earlier cultures had simple magnifying tools. The
Norsemen, the Romans, and surely the Egyptians before them
deployed reading stones, polished hemispheres of a clear
crystal mineral that a near sighted scribe might pass, delicately,
across a manuscript, enjoying the benefits of at least of a little
magnification. Such a magnifier acted as a simple lens. They
must have taken care not to let the reading crystal touch
the surface of parchment or papyrus. Even a well-polished
reading stone might have damaged a fragile document. The
word lens comes from Latin for “lentil.” The next time you
hold a lentil between your fingers you can see the legume as
a pair of convex lenses. There are lenses (not lentils) that date
to antiquity, one of the oldest being the British Museum’s socalled Nimrud Lens, a three-thousand-year-old Neo-Assyrian
disc of ground quartz, or maybe rock crystal. It’s about an inch
and a half long. The British Museum describes it as “of little or
no practical use” as an optical lens, but that hasn’t eliminated
speculation that the Assyrians used lenses, including this one,
in order to examine the world, or the cosmos, in detail greater
than the unaided human eye would permit.1
The power of the lens to focus the sun’s rays is one of
childhood’s first lessons in optics. It’s also one of the oldest. The
Nimrud Lens might have been used to ignite kindling, but by
the time Aristophanes is writing his comedies in fifth-century
Athens, the everyday art of harnessing the sun with a lens pops
14
eye chart
up as a plot device. In The Clouds, we hear about burning lenses
from Sokrates himself. A character named Strepsiades is in
debt, and hopes to have Sokrates train his son in argument so
that a lawsuit may be won. But there might be another way:
Strepsiades: Ooh, Sokrates, I’ve found a glorious
bamboozle! I’ve got it! Admit it, it’s wonderful!
Sokrates: Kindly expound it first.
Strepsiades: Well, have you ever noticed in the druggists’
shops that beautiful stone, that transparent sort of glass
that makes things burn?
Sokrates: A magnifying glass, you mean?
Strepsiades: That’s it. Well, suppose I’m holding one of
these, and while the court secretary is recording my case,
I stand way off, keeping the sun behind me, and scorch
out every word of the charges.
Sokrates: By the Graces, a magnificent Bamboozle!2
It’s a wicked plan—hold a lens at the proper angle, and the
sun’s rays could be focused on the wax tablet on which the
charge is registered. Strepsiades doesn’t follow through, but
the exchange tells us that Athenian druggists knew how to
use lenses to produce a heat source, at least on a sunny day.
I like the fact that Sokrates and Strepsiades are talking
about using the lens—something we bookish types consider
one of the great achievements of technology—not to read or to
see but to cheat. And not only to cheat but to cheat by melting
a text, erasing it clean away. (A friend who studies cuneiform
Reading Stars, Reading Stones
15
points to a longstanding professional rivalry in the study
of the ancient world. The Greeks had better literature than
the Assyrians, but the Greeks’ originals have been destroyed
by fire and time, and all that remains are copies, sometimes
error-filled copies of copies of copies. The Assyrians, on the
other hand, didn’t leave us the great tragedies, but what we
have are original documents, pressed into clay, baked and
rebaked by fires that would have destroyed combustible
papyrus, or vellum, much less wax tablets.)
The ancients had another means of enlarging an image,
and one that was less likely to melt or set fire to a document.
At the beginning of the Christian era, the Roman philosopher
Seneca mentions a method of magnification by filling a clear
vessel with water and placing it between the viewer and the
object to be studied. The next time you’re seated at a table
with a candle, maybe in a nice restaurant, place the water
glass between yourself and the flame and see the illumination
increase. Now hold up the bill to the glass to see if service was
included.
Developing a means of testing the strength of a person’s
vision sounds like a simple, progressive goal, beneficial
to everyone who might need corrective lenses. A society
where vision is understood to be correctable is also a society
preparing itself for increased literacy. It would also benefit the
lens makers, whose craft enabled them to produce polished
glass and crystal for both ornamental and practical purposes.
That one of the best-known manufacturers of vision
products today is called LensCrafters connects the work of
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contemporary optometry to the oldest, and insufficiently
understood, art of polished stones.
The premodern world had simple ways of enlarging
images. In an age when anyone can order up contact lenses,
we take for granted that before technological modernity
people simply coped with visual limitations as best as they
could. Can we know how well people could see in centuries
past? There’s ample evidence—in the precision of miniatures
and illuminated manuscripts, in the small typefaces of books
printed for a broad reading audience—that Early Modern
eyesight may have been even better than our own. It’s hard
to make comparisons of sensory abilities across time, but
some comparisons seem easier than others. It isn’t difficult
to believe, for example, that Shakespeare's audience heard—
listened—better than we do. In an era before recording, ears
had more work to do. Audiences for Beethoven or Wagner
in the nineteenth century had to pay better, closer attention
to music that could only be heard live, and rarely at that. We
can explain away our less attentive hearing. We punish our
ears with headphones and loud noises, we force our ears to
struggle with too much acoustic information and rely too
easily on the recoverability of desirable sounds thanks to
digital reproduction. But all that only adds up to evidence
that we have unlearned to hear, even as we use hearing aids
to collect more sensory data for auditory processing.
Vision is different. It would be hard to argue that people
see less well in the age of mechanical reproduction as a direct
result of there being more things to see, or because the welter
Reading Stars, Reading Stones
17
of technological messaging has dulled our capacity to make
precise visual discriminations. Some people demonstrate
extraordinary eyesight and visual skill. There are artisans of
the miraculous who carve things like the figure of Napoleon
in the eye of a needle. You can see such things—they’re
called micro miniatures—at Culver City’s charming and
strange Museum of Jurassic Technology, a modern cabinet
of curiosities where “looking” takes on new meaning.3 Such
miracles of sightededness, though, were created in the age of
the microscope, a tool unavailable to a medieval manuscript
illuminator who produced work all the more wondrous for
the absence of modern optical tools.
Medieval and Early Modern discussions of the eye are
surprisingly numerous. There’s even one by a pope. The
London College of Optometrists notes the historical jostling
for rights to the first documented spectacles, concluding that
the appliance was probably developed gradually over time.4
Ancient and medieval reading crystals notwithstanding, the
move from a handheld magnifying object to an appliance
worn on the face is the crucial transition to spectacles. The
thirteenth-century magus Roger Bacon is only one of the
medieval figures associated with the idea of eyeglasses, but
all indicators point to Italy, sometime in the late thirteenth
or early fourteenth century. The oldest extant depiction of
eyeglasses in a surviving work of art appears in a fresco painted
by Tommaso da Modena in Treviso, north of Venice, in 1352.5
As interior designers know, books make people look
smart. Renaissance artists, commissioned to record an
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aristocrat or scholar or successful merchant, knew this long
before House Beautiful. Art history is always a good place to
look for evidence of the real, even if it’s an idealized version
of the real. You can wander through any museum and trace
out the many ways in which reading is a principal activity of
figures in Old Masters paintings. Religious subjects would
be impoverished without the open book, sharing with
the viewer some Biblical moment in which the painting’s
subject is complicated with beautifully rendered codices.
Secular portraits depicted readers, too, adding depth to the
figure’s identity through the presence of readerly objects—
correspondence, ledgers, scholarly work, music—that
demonstrate the subject’s groundedness within the world
of letters. Place a man (the subject was almost always
male) alongside a pile of well-thumbed books and you’ve
said volumes about his thoughtfulness and intelligence.
Give a man eyeglasses and you’ve told the world how hard
he studies. The scholar-saints, like Jerome and Ambrose,
might be posed with a pair of glasses, either on the bridge
of the nose or on a shelf. So might a successful merchant,
scrutinizing a gold weight on a crowded desk.
By the fifteenth century there were artisans grinding
lenses and making frames to hold those lenses in place
upon the face. Absent any rigorous metric for determining
the strength of the client’s vision, the choice of eyeglasses
would have depended on trial and error. Yet however
difficult the process of finding the right lenses might have
been, eyeglasses were emerging as useful, and even prized,
Reading Stars, Reading Stones
19
objects: “Spectacles had broad currency among elites in Italy
and elsewhere from the mid-fifteenth century on, serving
not only as aids to vision but very correct gifts of courtly
patronage and as status symbols,” writes D. Graham Burnett.
“Moreover, understanding the needs of different customers
had led lens craftsmen in Florence and Milan to codify the
types of lenses available into graduated categories correlated
to the user’s age, and hence to what would be understood
today as myopic stages.”6 Those calibrations—market niches,
really—are the beginning of what the eye chart would be
testing for.
Aside from portraits, we have few images of eyeglasses in
the records of the Age of Discovery. There’s an early image
of a man with eyeglasses in Hartmann Schedel’s Nuremberg
Chronicle (1493), and a fleeting account by one of Magellan’s
crew to an encounter off Borneo. Upon being shown what
the Europeans had carried with them halfway across the
world, the islanders were most impressed, so the report goes,
with iron and with eyeglasses. (Maybe: the word could be
a mistranslation and may have meant “mirror” instead—
“eyeglasses” isn’t a term for which the native language would
have had an easy equivalent.7) It’s difficult not to connect
the sixteenth century’s explosion of print materials and
the Reformation’s validation of the vernacular with the
development of reading aids. Compared to life a century
earlier, the well-educated late sixteenth-century European
had access to a vastly expanded range of reading matter.
Broad reading was simple: all that was required was literacy,
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fluency in several languages, a budget large enough to buy
whatever books you wanted, a library in which to house
them, and eyeglasses so that you could read the small print.
E
The early seventeenth century was a period of epochal
advances in our understanding of vision and the
developments of tools to expand what the natural eye could
see. When he wasn’t busy revolutionizing our understanding
of planetary motion, Johannes Kepler’s experiments
with light led him to articulate an important principle of
optometry: the reversal of the image upon the retina. And
then there was Galileo.
Galileo took earlier Dutch experiments with the
telescope and trained a superior instrument on the night
sky, discovering truths about the moon and the solar system,
but at the same time demonstrating new capacities for
human vision. The unfolding drama of seventeenth-century
science is a series of discoveries and inventions, some of
which transformed our understanding of visuality simply by
showing that the eye could do what no one had imagined
it could. In 1610, at the moment that Galileo published his
Sidereus Nuncius (The Starry Messenger), our eyes became
more imposing organs of sight—ordinary eyes raised to a
higher power.
One of the great oh-to-have-been-there meetings in
history occurred in 1636, when the poet John Milton, then
twenty-eight, traveled to Italy and met the aging astronomer.
Reading Stars, Reading Stones
21
Milton would remember the encounter with Galileo. In
Book One of Paradise Lost, published thirty years later,
the now-blind poet made an allusion to the “optic glass”
of the “Tuscan artist.” In Book Three, Milton describes
Satan landing on the edge of Paradise and coming upon a
sight more dazzling than anything an astronomer might
see through the “glazed Optick tube” of the telescope. For
Milton, poetry triumphs even over telescopy, as poetic vision
must triumph over even the greatest lens making.
Beginning around 1674, the year of Milton’s death, the
Dutch tradesman and lens maker Antonie van Leeuwenhoek
put forward the results of his microscopic research, undoing
assumptions about unicellular life as well as about the
capacity of lenses to reveal the infinitely small world around
(and within) us. Leeuwenhoek’s invention and discoveries
went further: like Galileo before him, he was reinventing
the eye by redefining its capacities. We could see more than
we knew, as if unknown muscles had been discovered in the
visual body. The practical needs of ordinary people and the
celestial ambitions of astronomers converged in a need for
more precise measurement and a better understanding of
how well the eye might see. Precise measurement of visual
acuity, however, would have to wait for more than a century
and a half.
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eye chart
3 How to Choose
Eyeglasses
(circa 1623)
My father, whose eyesight was much better than mine, could
go to the drug store to buy off-the-rack reading glasses. Mass
production now makes it possible to standardize inexpensive
glasses of different strengths, and what you find in one drug
store will be the same in another. They’re not great, but
they’re cheap and they’re calibrated, so if you don’t know
which ones you need you might try on several until you find
the one that works. You might find some sort of small eye
chart there in the store, right between the hand sanitizer and
the sugar-free gum. We’ve long had devices to help us test
our own vision. Here’s one that was copyrighted in 1927, the
year my father was born.
You look through a little lens and move a tiny Snellen
target along a balsa wood strip until you can see it clearly.
The spot where the target lands is marked with a number
corresponding to the lens strength you need.
Figure 3.1 A 1920s optometer.
Before the nineteenth-century revolution in standardized
vision testing, you were pretty much consigned to trying on
what you thought was best for you. There were shops offering
a range of appliances, and before shops there were peddlers
toting boxes of glasses. You chose what seemed to match
your needs.
Eye charts are a nineteenth-century invention. There
was, however, a brilliant early attempt to test vision
precisely. It didn’t go anywhere, but it’s one of the wonders
of ophthalmological history. In 1623, the year that
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eye chart
Shakespeare’s colleagues created a posthumous collection of
his plays in one large folio volume, an obscure Spanish monk
published a remarkable guide to lenses and visual testing.
The Uso de los antojos para todo genero de vistas (The Use of
Eyeglasses for All Types of Vision) by Benito Daza de Valdés
has been referred to as the Holy Grail of ophthalmology.1 We
know little about Daza. He was born in Córdoba in 1591,
became a Dominican friar and minor functionary of the
Spanish Inquisition, and died in Seville in 1634. His name
lingers in official histories of optometry and on the door of
a Madrid optics institute, but Daza remains a distant figure.2
Daza’s book is as scarce as its author is remote; there are far
fewer locatable copies of the Uso than there are of the Bard’s
collected dramas. We have 235 copies of the First Folio of
Shakespeare’s plays, reports the Folger Shakespeare Library,
while a count of the Uso made a dozen years ago turned
up seventeen copies worldwide. One of those seventeen is
in the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, which is
where I was able to examine the real thing. If there were
ophthalmological justice, historically speaking, the little
book would be on a world tour of its own.
The Uso explains how lenses work and why they’re shaped
the way they are. There are chapters on blurred vision
in the elderly, natural and acquired defects of the eye, the
properties of convex and concave lenses, the best material
for making glasses (rock crystal lenses are rated highest,
though the celebrated Venetian glassblowers of Murano
provide a pretty good alternative), and so on. We learn that
How to Choose Eyeglasses (circa 1623)
25
Madrid, Lisbon, Seville, and Rome are places you might
have gone to buy your glasses, though peddlers were always
available. Crucially, the Uso provides a sort of home test for
determining what “degree” of lens the user might require. It’s
basically an Early Modern textbook in optometry, and like
other instructional publications of the seventeenth century,
it delivers its valuables in several modes: through diagrams,
explanatory passages, and dialogues.
In the title of Daza’s book the word “antoios” (or antojos,
the i and j being interchangeable) signifies the use of devices
“before the eyes” [ante oculos]. Spectacles are crystals before
the eyes, not implements to be held in the hand. It’s the
difference between a magnifying glass and a pair of designer
frames. Spectacles are appliances, detachable worn things,
and their invention is a sign of what we might think of as
optical modernity.
In modern Spanish the term for spectacles in the sense of
eyeglasses is anteojos, a word that preserves its Latin origins
just a shade more visibly than the seventeenth-century
antojos. In modern usage, on the other hand, the Spanish
word antojos can be translated as fancy, or whim, or triviality.
A restaurant might bring antojos before you order your
dinner. Antojos—appetizers, amuse gueules, fancies—placed
before you, and before your eyes, too.
Compare the English word spectacle, which might
mean some extravagant thing that requires attention—a
play, for example. In the plural, spectacles could then be
several extravagant things, or it could be a collective noun
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identifying the thing through which one looks. A pair of
spectacles might be handy for viewing a spectacle.
In As You Like It, Jaques delivers Shakespeare’s famous
“Seven Ages of Man” speech, and when he talks of physical
decline, the age of “the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,” he notes
that this is the age when man will have “spectacles on nose.”
But when in Henry VI Part 2, the grieving queen Margaret
curses her own eyes as “blind and dusky spectacles,” the
playwright elides our distinction between the eye as an
organ and the eye as a device, the thing that sees and the
thing through which one might see. In The Winter’s Tale, the
raving King Leontes, convinced that his wife is unfaithful,
asserts that the good Camillo can see this as well, “or your
eye-glass / Is thicker than a cuckold’s horn”—here eye-glass
is the eye’s lens, or more exactly a lens rendered opaque by
a cataract. Nowhere in the plays does Shakespeare speak of
“eyeglasses” in the modern sense, but the word “crystals”
does show up, and when it does it once again refers to one’s
eyes. In the second act of Henry V, when the hostess reports
the death of Falstaff, the fat knight’s former ensign Pistol tells
the hostess that it’s time to “clear thy crystals”—stop crying—
and say goodbye.
E
Daza’s Uso makes a spectacle of its subject. On the title
page the printer has set the most wonderful device: a pair
of eyeglasses, radiant with energy. Light seems to stream
outward to four eyes placed in the corners of the rectangular
How to Choose Eyeglasses (circa 1623)
27
Figure 3.2 Uso de los antojos, title page.
plate. It’s an image, suggestive of extromission, one of the
prevailing theories of vision according to which sight was the
result of the eye sending out rays that captured and retrieved
the image of the thing viewed. In one lens is a brilliant
anthropomorphic sun, and in the other sits the man in the
moon. Lozenges with stylized concave and convex lenses
28
eye chart
bracket the image. These eyes watch and are watched; the
appliance sharpens vision by day or night.
Other title pages of the period also envisioned light
and vision as important symbols of the contents to follow.
In 1626, three years after the Uso’s publication, Sir Francis
Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum, or a Natural History in Ten Centuries
(meaning ten groups of one hundred entries) appeared in
print. The popular volume was a collection of one thousand
“experiments”—though they were more like thought
experiments than laboratory protocols; the Scientific
Revolution was just getting under way. The work has a
famous title page showing the revelation of divine light, here
the unspeakable Hebrew name of God, shining down so that
mankind can see the world.
In the seventeenth century the divine source of light had
biblical, as well as astronomical, authority. Today another
image of superhuman light passes through American hands
in the form of the Great Seal of United States, one of the
two engraved insets on the reverse of the dollar bill, with
its Masonic eye looking down from a triangular eminence.
“Annuit coeptis,” reads the motto. It isn’t easy to translate,
which is one reason it hasn’t joined the short list of Latin
phrases in popular culture. Annuit coeptis means something
like “it favors undertakings,” where the shining eye of wisdom
looks down kindly upon the actions of mankind below.
Daza’s frontispiece engraving is different. Divine light is
present (he’s a cleric, after all, and the book is dedicated to
Our Lady), but the source of the radiance seems to be coming
How to Choose Eyeglasses (circa 1623)
29
Figure 3.3 Francis Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum, title page.
from the spectacles. The light just might be within us. In the
great age of the telescope and the microscope a good pair of
eyeglasses makes discoverers of us all.3
We don’t know much about the origins of Daza’s text. An
approval for publication is dated three years earlier in 1620,
and the exclusive license for its sale expired in 1633, five
years before the author’s death in 1638. There was no second
edition in Spanish, and apparently no translation published
30
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in English or any other European tongue, not even Latin, the
tongue of tongues. A French translation, undertaken within
a century of publication, survived in manuscript but was
never published.4 So Daza’s book functionally disappears,
but not because it was quickly superseded by more detailed
or more accurate guides to lenses and visual acuity. The Uso
is not only the first of its kind—it is its kind. There would be
nothing like it, at least not until the mid-nineteenth century
when Dutch, Austrian, and German physicians rewrote the
book on eye measurement.
So what does the Uso contain? In early seventeenthcentury Catholic Spain, one might expect that a text with
Daza’s scientific ambitions might be subject to special
scrutiny, but Daza passes with flying colors. The censor’s
preface assures the reader that nothing here is contrary to
Church doctrine and that the author’s style is suave, breue, y
compendioso (smooth, succinct, and yet broad). Inside, Daza
lays out the earliest printed diagrams for testing eyesight and
offers a remarkable discussion of optical strength, weakness,
and correction, sometimes in surprising detail. He takes
pains to note, for example, the changing strength of vision
in each decade of adult life, assigning a predictable degree of
weakening for each ten-year period. He even notes, without
prejudice, that women’s eyesight changes over the life course
at a different rate than men’s. Whether or not modern
diagnostic techniques would support such a view, it’s startling
to encounter this straightforward empirical report of gender
as a factor in predicting changes in visual acuity.
How to Choose Eyeglasses (circa 1623)
31
The Uso’s early eye charts, with their markings and
numbers, almost look readable to us today: the scales, the
graduation, the definitive starry punctuation—the graphic
elements are startlingly confident.
Writing simply and in the vernacular, Daza provided
scales and diagrams that might work as self-tests, the way
L.L.Bean has you trace your foot on a piece of paper to see
what size boot you should order. The Uso includes an even
simpler procedure: lining up several mustard seeds, spacing
them according to instructions, and determining the point
at which the viewer can no longer distinguish one tiny seed
from the next. With Daza’s mustard seeds we’re somewhere
between the twinned stars in the Arabian desert and the
fuzzy bottom line of Snellen’s chart. Eye testing is always
about the threshold.
Historians of medicine have written about Daza,5 but
from the perspective of cultural history, the most interesting
part of the Uso is the concluding series of dialogues in which
gentlemen discuss their eye conditions with experts. In a
Figure 3.4 Testing image from Uso de los antojos.
32
eye chart
Figure 3.5 Testing image from Uso de los antojos.
passage noteworthy for its content and its casualness, we’re
introduced to travelers Jorge and Esteban, dos caballeros
indianos (two gentlemen from the Indies). At home they have
seen a pair of eyeglasses of Spanish manufacture, and they
have traveled across the ocean to have their eyes checked by
a famous specialist.
Jorge and Esteban become the premise for a dialogue
concerning ways in which eyes are imperfect and how lenses
can be crafted to compensate. Jorge, nearsighted since early
childhood, has struggled with glasses in quite recognizable
ways: his embarrassment at needing them, his wife’s advice
that he shouldn’t wear them because they make him look
old, the frustration of arriving at the theater and, having
forgotten his glasses, being unable to see the performance.
How to Choose Eyeglasses (circa 1623)
33
Here at last, after his long journey, Jorge gets the professional
help he seeks.
Such an offhand demonstration of Atlantic cultural
exchange in the early seventeenth century is startling: a
voyage across the Atlantic from the Americas to Spain, purely
for the purposes of professional eye care and the purchase
of eyeglasses, is passed off to us as nothing particularly
remarkable. The traveler who flies from Tokyo to New York
to purchase a pair of designer frames today at Morgenthal
Frederics or Robert Marc is hardly making an equivalent
investment of time and effort.
In another of the Uso’s narrative episodes, Daza presents the
reader with the farsighted Señor Claudio, testing out a series
of lenses. He discusses his options with a figure identified only
as el Maestro—the Master—who patiently demonstrates his
optometric expertise. Claudio and the Maestro progress through
a battery of tests—without, of course, the benefit of split-lens
refraction or other tools of modern-day diagnostics. Yet four
hundred years have not changed the essence of the optician’s
trade. The Maestro asks the question we could be hearing in a
twenty-first-century examining room: “Better or worse?”
Once it becomes clear that the stronger the glasses, the
smaller the type he will be able to read, Claudio wants the
strongest lenses possible. But the Maestro demurs. People
go blind, he cautions, trying to train their eyes to see more
and more precisely. The reproof is more than a concern for
the patient’s eyestrain; in the early seventeenth century the
prevailing philosophy of optical correction encouraged the
34
eye chart
use of weaker and weaker glasses so that the eye would—at
least in theory—gradually increase in strength.
Eyeglasses were critical to reading, but as Daza’s text
shows, they weren’t functional only in the sense of increasing
one’s ability to apprehend the world. Eyeglasses performed
an important social function. Daza gamely makes his point
through the introduction of yet one more optometric straw
man. Enter Marcelo who, with his corrected vision, can
at last describe himself as señor de todo que lo veo. Lord of
everything I see, he exclaims with delight. A later and more
memorable version of that idea is the phrase “monarch of all
I survey”—which, by the way, is not without irony. It comes
from “The Solitude of Alexander Selkirk,” an eighteenthcentury poem by William Cowper. Selkirk, famous for having
been marooned on a South Seas island, became an inspiration
for Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. So much for range of vision.
Marcelo’s story tells us something about accurate sight not
only as a practical matter of biological survival but as tool
for both social and political engagement. Eyeglasses were
becoming socially necessary because it’s impossible to behave
properly if you can’t see properly. Vision correction morphs
into a mechanism for social correction, which in turn is
about self-development and social mastery. And so the Uso
explains how nearsightedness can lead to social difficulties.
Marcelo’s most embarrassing moment:
It happens that (for my sins) I must have been born
nearsighted, and I never noticed this fault so much as I
How to Choose Eyeglasses (circa 1623)
35
do now, when it afflicts me especially, as it undercuts all
the pleasure and exercise I take in going out of doors, as
you know, and I swear that I can’t even see the game that
my feet flush up. The same occurs with many people that I
encounter on the street, about whom I make such mistakes
that on occasion some of my friends believe I deliberately
don’t remove my cap for them. That’s why—more often
than not—I take it off without knowing whom I am taking
it off to, which violates the rules of social decorum. And
as a result of this politeness, an awful thing happened to
me while I was a student in Salamanca, which I remember
to this day: as I was walking down a street, I took off my
cap to a lady who was at her window, and as I saw that
my servants began to laugh at me, I asked them who
that person was, and they answered that it was a side of
mutton that had been hung up. I blessed myself and made
a thousand signs of the cross, for I would have sworn that
I’d seen her, with all her veils and all her features. But all
this aside, I can see on the other hand that when I look
at something close up I’m a lynx, and there’s no letter, no
matter how small, that can hide from me: even at night,
by moonlight, I can see and read very well. I’m amazed at
these two extremes, and I don’t know what to make of it
myself.6
Marcelo’s embarrassing encounter with a sheep carcass brings
us face to face with a world where social rules count. Daza
writes that Marcelo is pervirtiendo las cortesias (perverting
36
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the order of courtesies), undermining the social order and
the ideologies that protect it through sumptuary laws and
other ritual displays of status. Marcelo needs eyeglasses so
that he can tell a doña from a criada, a lady from her servant.
Or from a side of mutton.
Marcelo and Claudio, the one nearsighted and the other
farsighted, propose traveling together, having discovered,
like all odd couples from Plato to Neil Simon, that their
conditions are complementary. In the Symposium, Plato
has Aristophanes expound fancifully on the nature of love,
which he does by recounting a myth of human origins
that depends on incomplete figures searching for their
completing, complementary other halves. Shakespeare,
following the Roman comedy of Plautus, picked up the trope
in The Comedy of Errors, where not one but two pairs of
twins reunite and complete themselves. Marcelo and Claudio
are optical twins, or at least optical opposites constructed
for educational purposes. Here convex and concave are
complementary variations that not only correct us into
normality but also make us complete. When mid-twentiethcentury men referred to their wives as their “better halves”
(the phrase is, I think, now safely on the shelf) they were
unknowingly a part of a 2500-year-old theory of love and
unity.
E
What might we take away from the adventures of Daza’s
optometric straw men? First, that people in the Early Modern
How to Choose Eyeglasses (circa 1623)
37
European and Atlantic world worried about their vision,
fussed over the choice of eyeglasses, and might even have
traveled thousands of miles to be tended by highly regarded
professionals. Daza’s attempts to regularize a protocol speak
to the absence of a reliable system of visual measurement.
As to social control, Daza’s lessons make eyeglasses part of
the citizen’s responsibility not only to the self but also to a
hierarchical society.
To a cultural materialist, the ability to resemble one’s social
betters is more than dress-up; the gesture peeks behind the
curtain of social systems, and when it looks there it finds the
essential artifice of class busily adjusting the rules to maintain
itself. A cat may look at a king, and a wealthy middle-class cat
can dress like one, too, and that becomes a problem. What
you wear—how you look—can be a deception. It’s in this
period that the highwayman and the pickpocket step onto the
literary stage, characters ready to delight readers with stories
of trickery and theft. The swindler and the thief, the fraud,
the man or woman who pretends—through the sign-system
of clothing—to be what he or she isn’t—all demonstrate the
pleasures and dangers of deception. In sixteenth-century
England, the Tudors, alarmed by the economic success of
non-aristocrats, enforced sumptuary laws, issued decrees
that banned all but royals from wearing purple silk, gold
tissue, or sable, even if a sixteenth-century fashion plate
could afford such things. In 1623, Philip IV of Spain cracked
down on sumptuary violations. There should be no social
misreading. Eyeglasses might help.
38
eye chart
Perhaps Galileo’s telescope, like Newton’s later in the
century, was from a lensmaker’s perspective only one more
antojo, something else to be placed before the eyes so that
powers of vision could be heightened beyond their natural
capacity. But the telescope and the pair of spectacles work
different changes on the sensorium: the telescope, like
Hooke’s microscope, is an invention of the exceptional, a
mechanism that exploits the endless appetite for greater
visual acuity, moving the viewer deeper and deeper into the
visual field. Eyeglasses, on the other hand, are inventions of
the normal. They exist to make possible integration of the
visually impaired into the realm of the social.
How Early Moderns understood deficiencies in vision, and
how they invented means of overcoming those deficiencies,
is part not only of the history of medicine and technology.
It’s part of the invention of the self-regulating individual, the
subject newly equipped with metrics for daily living, whose
experience, for better or for worse, is part of what we mean
by “becoming modern.” Only a part of Daza’s book concerns
testing visual acuity, but that small part inched us toward
the professional evaluation and prescription that early
nineteenth-century ophthalmologists would make their
project.
How to Choose Eyeglasses (circa 1623)
39
40
4 The Persistence
of Memory
In the scientific seventeenth century, the lens became an
object of extraordinary importance, perhaps less so in terms
of eyeglasses than for the development of the telescope. The
history of telescope making even has a curious connection to
the document we know as the Snellen chart.
Though the Dutch are credited with the first Early
Modern telescopes, the focus of action soon moved to Italy.
In the decades following Galileo’s death in 1642 (the year
that, as fate would have it, Isaac Newton was born), Italian
telescope makers went from strength to strength, competing
with one another to produce the strongest and most accurate
instruments in all Europe. Among the distinguishing features
of late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian intellectual
life was the prominence of the accademia, a confraternity (or
academy) whose members devoted themselves to intellectual
pursuits. Among the most prominent of these organizations
was the Accademia dei Lincei (the academy of the lynxes), so
called because their eyesight (or their intellectual perspicuity)
was remarkable, at least by their own account. Galileo was
admitted as a member in 1611.
Another organization, the Accademia del Cimento,
predated England’s Royal Society and became the first
European organization to devote itself to experimentation.
The Accademia del Cimento lasted only for a single decade,
from 1657 to 1667, but in that time one of its concerns was the
rivalry between two optical inventors, Eustachio Divini and
Giuseppe Campani. Among the most prominent figures in the
European network of optical researchers and manufacturers,
Eustachio Divini was born in 1610 and studied under a
student of Galileo’s. Beginning his professional life as a
maker of clocks, Divini soon took up the art of lens making.
By 1646, he was manufacturing compound microscopes
and telescopes, producing instruments that were admired
and collected. Several still exist today. Giuseppe Campani,
twenty-five years his junior, was also recognized as an
outstanding manufacturer of telescopes, some of which were
as much as fifty feet long.
The rivalry between Divini and Campani reached
its climax in 1660 in an extraordinary field test. How to
compare telescopes? A sort of telescopic duel was devised,
but a duel with an interesting twist: one telescope would be
set up in Rome, the other in Florence. The telescopes were
separately examined and judged on their individual merits,
but it was decided that they had to be tested together; the
object was to be a point not in the sky but on land.1 It being
42
eye chart
easier to transport a test document than a telescope, it was
in theory possible to test different instruments in different
locations and compare the results. The question remained
how one might accurately measure the comparable power
and precision of two different optical instruments in two
distant locations.
It was proposed that the instruments be directed at a
page of graduated text mocked up expressly for this purpose
and positioned at a point equidistant from both telescopes.
The results, however, were not conclusive. There were
disagreements on how close to the test sheet assistants were
to hold the lamps. Arguments ensued about the relative purity
of the air in Rome and Florence and its effect on visibility.
Most important, the telescopes had been tested by different
observers, men whose own degrees of visual acuity would
result in different interpretations of the telescope’s image.2
There was another handicap in the 1660 tests, too, and
this one was literary. The test sheet—the page on which the
ocular devices were trained—was composed not of random
symbols or even of single words but of lines of poetry. What
were the literary passages? Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra
vita (In the middle of the journey of our life)—the first line
of Dante’s Commedia. Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono
(You who hear the sound in scattered rhymes)—the first line
of Petrarch’s great volume of sonnets.3 (Imagine asking an
American patient to read all of a line that begins “Oh, say can
you see . . .” or a Briton asked to read out a line that began
The Persistence of Memory
43
“Land of hope and . . .” It wouldn’t be hard to get a positive
result.) Given the terms of the protocol, the telescope viewed
by an educated viewer could be judged the finer instrument.
So in its first attempt, the “duel of the telescopes” failed. The
Accademia realized its error and subsequently produced test
forms utilizing nonsense words in place of classic Tuscan.
The model of a competition for testing telescopes had been
established, and “the competition between these masters even
led to a tradition of public trials known as paragoni, in which
the telescopes or objective lenses of master craftsmen would
be set up beside one another and trained on some distant
writing or object, in order to compare clarity and resolving
power. In proposing a non-signifying series of letters, the
Accademia del Cimento was two hundred years ahead of
Herman Snellen’s chart.4 Poetry gave way to nonsense as
science outweighed literary patrimony, but all in a good cause.
The case of the dueling telescopes is a reminder of a
fundamental principle on which eye charts, including the
Snellen chart and its graphic descendants, are based: testing
the ability to see depends upon disabling the ability to read.
The good eye chart should not make sense in order to get our
attention.
A variant on the practice was long a feature of the modern
publishing industry, where word-like sequences of letters,
or sentence-like sequences of words, were paced along text
lines to craft what’s called dummy copy. The point is to create
a visual pattern, not to create meaningful text. Here the
objective isn’t to test visual strength but to judge the effect of
44
eye chart
a text block within a preliminary overall design. A designer
producing this sort of work might sometimes be said to be
“Greeking type,” filling out the measure of a sample text
block with meaningless words (though if any language other
than English were to be used for dummy type it would be
Latin, and certainly not Greek).
The most famous example of sample type is the notorious
“Lorem ipsum” passage. It begins thus:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.
Quisque ultricies justo eu lorem scelerisque, eget porta
ligula porta. Etiam sollicitudin diam dolor, a bibendum
orci commodo id. Vestibulum dignissim pulvinar risus, a
commodo est posuere in
But the “Lorem ipsum” text isn’t really a text at all. It’s Latin
gibberish (or Latinish gibber). There’s no such thing as a
Lorem, except maybe in Dr. Seuss. What we do have here,
though, are Latin words, or parts of them, or fragments of
parts, complete with cases and declensions. But this still isn’t
genuine Latin. Or rather it’s a genuine unreadable text.
Latin looks different than English. There are fewer
ascenders and descenders in Latin letters, so that the
type as set has what a type designer would call a different
“texture.” Even fake Latin can have that texture. From a
purely typographic perspective, there’s nothing wrong
with fake Latin. It’s a content-free dispersal of textual
elements intended to show a designer, or a client, the
The Persistence of Memory
45
effect of font, size, leading, and margins. It’s meant to be
unreadable but not distractingly unreadable, as it would
be if, say, the space were fitted out with emojis or unicode
box drawings.
So where did lorem ipsum come from? The mystery was
solved by Dr. Richard McClintock, who located those two
words to a single page of the 1914 Loeb Classics edition of
Cicero’s De finibus bonorum et malorum (On the Ends of
Good and Evil), where the word dolorem is split—do- is on
one page and lorem on the turn. So someone, possibly in the
1960s, came across a 1914 copy of a Loeb Cicero, opened it,
turned to this one particular page, found a series of letters,
took some, scrambled others, and produced the most famous
non-Latin text no Roman ever read.
Despite its specific intent, the so-called lorem ipsum
passage has migrated from type samples to embroidered
samplers, presumably under the assumption that the garbled
“text” is a genuine quotation from the antique. A few years
ago I came across lorem ipsum needlepoint pillows (in
learned Cambridge, England, of all places). You can buy
lorem ipsum T-shirts and stickers on line, most of which are
clearly in on the joke.
E
A century after Daza, English preachers could turn to vision
care as a metaphor for care of the soul. In 1716, the vicar of
Barton, Lincolnshire could warn his congregation about the
46
eye chart
Figure 4.1 A sermon can test eyes, too.
moral dangers of bad eyesight. “A Discovery of the Snake in
the Grass: or a Spectacle for Weak Eyes” urges the listener
to consider the Gospel as the pair of spectacles we all need
so that we can avoid sin. In this case one size fits all. No eye
chart needed.
Did eighteenth-century optometrists devise any better
way to select lenses for their patients than the trial and error
The Persistence of Memory
47
that had guided purchasers for two centuries? Or did they
take with them trade secrets we have yet to uncover? We
have some evidence that eighteenth-century optometrics
would share the views of Daza’s Maestro in matters of lens
strength.
In his Essay on Vision, the eighteenth-century English
optician George Adams wrote that “the discovery of optical
instruments may be esteemed among the most noble, as well
as among the most useful gifts, which the Supreme Artist hath
conferred on man.”5 As to strength, however, Adams argues
that spectacles are overused, and that the purpose of having
them is to bring one’s weakened eyesight into conformity
with its natural ability rather than simply to make one’s
eyes stronger. Adams is a practitioner as well as a theorist,
and the Essay provides glimpses of what it was like for the
eighteenth-century client to shop for corrective lenses. The
picture Adams paints is of the customer trying out lens after
lens, and falling into a sort of confused exhaustion from the
effort, with the result that the brain stops judging accurately
and the client further weakens the eyes. Adams’s opinion is
an extension of the seventeenth-century view that the goal
of eyeglasses is secondarily to enable reading and primarily
to strengthen the eye and thus rendering the use of glasses
unnecessary. The matter of how to test precisely for vision
strength, however, remained unresolved into the nineteenth
century.
Like many successful inventions, Snellen’s eye chart
followed earlier, less economical work by others. In
48
eye chart
the mid-1830s, the German ophthalmologist Heinrich
Küchler proposed a chart to test his patient’s eyes, using
images of common things he had cut out of illustrated
calendars.6 Then Küchler had an insight that was also
a linguistic breakthrough: in 1843 he composed a chart
that abandoned objects for words, which he stacked one
on top of the other, in descending order of size. One of
Küchler objectives was to help doctors treating those who
were losing their sight, those “whose visual ability the
physician wishes to measure and, in the interest of curing,
must measure.”7 Here’s an image of Küchler chart—three,
in fact.
Figure 4.2 The Küchler chart.
The Persistence of Memory
49
In English the first five lines would read
The familiar descent from large type to small points ahead
to the Snellen chart—the strong, clear figure at the top, and
then the infinity fade. Even on their own, there’s something
strange and compelling about the Küchler charts, with their
singular nouns and German place names, all tricked out in
upper- and lowercase German Fraktur typeface. Küchler’s
three panels suggest that he acknowledged the problem of
memory, and that he wanted the patient to work fresh, not
from the recollection of what had just been shown.
In finding his materials in random printed sources,
Küchler was doing what would become a principle of
European avant-garde art almost a century later. Cutting out
pictures and words from newspapers, Küchler’s diagnostic
project feels like a forerunner of Modernism: Dada’s language
games, Duchamp’s celebration of the readymade, Hannah
Höch’s bouquet of eyes, and the dueling collages of Braque
and Picasso, who incorporated or reproduced elements
of newspaper text into their compositions. Kidnappers, of
course, would use the same tools to produce ransom notes.
50
eye chart
Even after abandoning images of things and turning
to words, Küchler testing device was still a very thing-y
diagnostic, asking the person being examined to see mainly
the names of objects that themselves could be seen. Of the
first five lines, only the words Reich (empire) and Fünfzig
(fifty) are conceptual, but even they don’t feel very conceptual
in this company.
Still, there’s a poetic quality to Küchler charts, and
something of the kindergarten room, too. Looking at his
very German selection of terms, it’s easy to think of other
possible entries for a word-based eye chart. A more humble
selection of nouns, for example, presented without graduated
sizes, that would locate young readers in a lexicon of reading
primers—Ball, Cat, Mother, House, Tree—the sort of display
that would introduce early readers of the Dick and Jane 1950s
to the visual signs for the nouns that make up their world.
Despite his efforts to make multiple tests, the problem with
Küchler’s eye chart is a problem that has always dogged tests
for visual accuracy: words and other familiar objects offer
too many clues, and on the basis of those clues the patient
can fill in the blanks. It isn’t easy to outwit the determined
cheat. Memorization is a flaw in all stable eye charts—prior
access or a commitment to retaining what one sees becomes
a way of gaming the visual system.
It’s the same problem that plagued that first competition
between Divini and Campani in seventeenth-century Italy. If
you know the word Mother but you can only see the letters
M O T H E it probably doesn’t make any difference if you
The Persistence of Memory
51
can’t decide whether the last letter is an R or a P. You’ll guess
the word, and that defeats the purpose of the test. The eye
chart needs unfamiliarity to be effective, and unfamiliarity
can be hard to sustain.
The generation after Küchler advanced the ideas he had
developed to make fundamental breakthroughs in visual
testing. Prominent among them was Franciscus Donders.
In 1858, the year he established his eye hospital, Donders
was working through important ophthalmological research,
including studies of vision and reaction time. He had ideas
about how eye charts could work better, ideas he passed
along to his assistant, Herman Snellen. Building on the
work of Donders and others, Snellen developed his famous
diagram, the graphic breakthrough of nineteenth-century
ophthalmology, which is the eye chart we know.
E
As useful as the eye chart would prove to be, the century’s
most important mechanical device for examining the eye
was the invention of the ophthalmoscope in 1851 by the
brilliant young German physician Hermann von Helmholtz.
Helmholtz was interested in everything—philosophy, the
conservation of energy, the mechanics of visual examination,
thermodynamics—and made contributions to all these fields.
At the age of thirty he revolutionized ophthalmological
practice: by means of an ingenious arrangement of mirrors,
Helmholtz’s ophthalmoscope permitted the physician to
look through the dilated pupil into the back, or fundus, of
52
eye chart
the eye. For the first time it was possible to observe directly
the retina and the base of the optic nerve. The eye was made
visible in a new and powerful way.
Few examples of Helmholtz’s original ophthalmoscopes
survive, but the device your doctor uses today is a modern
updating of the nineteenth-century tool that changed how
eyes could be examined. It is in the nature of things that we take
the ophthalmoscope (and most medical devices) for granted,
but in its capacity to make the invisible visible, Helmholtz’s
invention was compared to another groundbreaking, and
more familiar, medical device: the stethoscope. The word
stethoscope is a neologism from the Greek meaning “to see
the chest.” Invented in 1819 by the French physician René
Laennec, the stethoscope is the medical tool that, as Michel
Meulders writes, made audible what was invisible.8 It’s worth
noting that the history of medicine is charged with episodes,
inventions, and discoveries that allow us to see (or hear) what
cannot be seen with the naked eye. The ophthalmoscope was
one of them. Together with the eye chart, the eye exam had
two powerful tools for assessing vision.
The problem of memory would linger in eye chart design,
challenging the ingenuity of inventors, graphic designers,
and medical professionals. One solution, a revolving drum
with flat panels of diagnostic images on each side, was in
use by 1906.9 Optometry would struggle with the problem
of repetition and memory until computerization, when
it became possible to adjust instantly the letters or other
figures placed before the viewer.10 In the digital present, the
The Persistence of Memory
53
familiar Snellen arrangement and its many variants could be
reformatted or replaced with the speed and facility we now
take everywhere for granted.
If there was long a concern that Snellen’s eye chart might
be memorized, the emergence of advanced technological
solutions may mean that Snellen’s diagnostic chart is already
become an historical artifact, the founding document in
how we understood modern visual testing and, like many
founding documents, an object receding from view. The
Snellen chart might be a thing we want to remember after all.
54
eye chart
5 Eleven Lines,
Nine Letters
The mid-nineteenth century has been called ophthalmology’s
Golden Age. In Utrecht, Donders was making groundbreaking
discoveries—“with a clearness and precision without
parallel,” wrote an admiring contemporary1—concerning
refraction, the changes affecting a light wave as it passes
through different mediums (like the liquid within the
eyeball), and accommodation, the mechanisms by which the
eye alters the shape of the lens in order to focus on a close or
distant object.
The problems of reliable visual measurement were several:
mechanics, ease of administration, possible memorization of
the testing materials, and above all standardization, accuracy,
and reproducibility. Following Küchler and others, Snellen’s
early experiments with eye chart design involved shapes,
but shapes were difficult for the observer to describe. Then
in 1862 he hit upon his breakthrough graphic: eleven lines,
clear type, nine alphabetic forms distributed in an apparently
random fashion, reduction in size from top to bottom. Letters
were, after all, shapes, too, but they were shapes most people
could recognize. The following year, Snellen had what would
prove to be the eye chart’s big break: the British Army took
up his chart to test its recruits.
In the Victorian era, the military objective of visual
testing was to ensure that a recruit could fire a rifle and hit a
target. With Snellen’s chart, the British military could study
scientifically which potential recruits could be entrusted
with firearms. Almost overnight, there was a reliable tool for
measuring the accuracy of a recruit’s vision.
If all the men who wanted to join up had been literate,
Snellen’s chart might have been a complete success as
designed. But they weren’t and it wasn’t. An Army Medical
Report for 1887 found that 9 percent “of the recruits that
sought enlistment” were “unable to read.” It’s one thing to
have difficulty reading; it’s another not to be able to identify
individual letters. The Snellen chart had to be modified
with the introduction of test dots. During the examination,
the subject would be asked to count the number of dots
within a specific area at a specified distance. It was hardly
satisfactory—even the Surgeon-General, who had requested
this variation on the Snellen chart, thought that if “all recruits
could read, it would be far better to use types of definite sizes,
such as Snellen’s, for the examination of vision.”2 Dots were,
at least temporarily, a necessary compromise.
Despite military claims to rigor, standards for visual
acuity in the armed forces have probably always been
flexible. In 1914, a military report could declare that
56
EYE CHART
“Candidates for naval cadetships must possess full normal
vision as determined by Snellen’s tests, each eye being
separately examined,” while in the case of other branches of
the Royal Navy “full normal vision is not required.” Normal
vision here is uncorrected vision, which is to say that Navy
recruits could wear corrective lenses but would be ineligible
for cadetships.
The report goes on to offer, in elaborate detail, the levels
of visual impairment permissible—and to which degree for
which positions—throughout the Empire: the Royal Irish
Constabulary, the Indian Pilot Service, the Department of
Forestry, and on and on. For each, the military machine of
the Edwardian era specified how well you would have to be
able to see to get and keep that particular appointment. A
special emphasis is placed on color blindness, and which
positions would be unavailable to the color-blind candidate.
There is even something called the “Colour-Ignorance Test”:
“The object of this test is simply to ascertain whether the
candidate knows the names of the three colours, red, green
and white, and the test is to be confined to the naming of
colours.”3 No positions are specified for which being “colouraware” would be a requirement.
The British Army became the largest and most important
early client for Snellen’s chart, and the military collaboration
laid the ground for recruit testing worldwide. The military
need for accurate visual discrimination would, in fact, play
an important role in the creation of another test. In the midst
of the First World War, the Japanese government supported
Eleven Lines, Nine Letters
57
the work of Shinobu Ishihara, an ophthalmologist who had
studied in both Tokyo and Europe. Like the British, the
Japanese army needed a tool to determine the accuracy
of color perception. The focus of Ishihara’s test for color
blindness would be the ability to distinguish two colors
that looked very much alike but weren’t, colors that were
pseudo-isochromatic (or “only apparently the same colors”).
Building on earlier tests for pseudo-isochromatism, Ishihara
developed the kernel of our modern color blindness exam:
disks containing colored circles of varying size and tones
arranged to surround a figure (usually an Arabic number) in
a slightly different color. The inability to see a green number
amid a field of red circles or a blue number amid a field of
green indicates a particular form of visual impairment.
Color blindness is a sex-linked disorder, carried on the X
chromosome, and significantly more prevalent in men than
in women. The National Institutes of Health estimate that up
to 8% of northern European males (and 0.5% females) may
be color-blind.4
Snellen presented the patient with a single chart across
which letter forms were strategically arranged. Ishihara’s
color blindness test provided a single, artfully concealed
image. Where the pre-digital Snellen test presents the patient
with all materials at once, the Ishihara test shows the patient
one single image after another. A century after its first
publication in 1917, the Ishihara test remains a significant
diagnostic tool.
58
EYE CHART
E
As a graphic, the Snellen chart is more than a diagnostic
tool. It’s an event—confident, hierarchical—a display with
stars and corps, a défilé, a fashion show, a march, with that
great E at the head of the visual parade, followed by ranks in
descending order.5 If this were the military, they would be
colonels and majors, captains and lieutenants and sergeants.
If E were God, the rows of descending letters would be
thrones, dominions, and powers. But E is not God. God is
in the details. The Snellen chart steps down in smaller and
smaller type, until it finally gets down to business.
Two things you’re likely to know about the Snellen eye
chart: there’s an enormous letter E at the top (you’ve already
found it throughout this text as a dingbat where you might
have expected an asterisk instead), and so-called “perfect
vision” is 20/20.
The ratio 20/20 is often called the Snellen fraction, about
which more in a moment. (In metric measure, 20/20 is
notated as 6/6, a ratio that never sounds quite the same.)
The term developed its own cultural life. The name of the
long-running ABC news magazine 20/20 acknowledges this
ideal of “perfect” vision, and also manages to suggest that
perfect sight is balanced, favoring neither left nor right (eye
or political view). Recently, colleges have taken up the shout
of 20/20 as a way to brand their institutional vision (colleges,
now following the battle cry of corporations, are all about
vision and vision statements).6
Eleven Lines, Nine Letters
59
This common usage aside, we are likely to confuse
20/20—a base standard for good vision—with “perfect”
vision (whatever that would be). Maybe it’s the implicit
mathematics—20 over 20 being read as a unity, a resolution
to 1—that encourages a popular belief that 20/20 is not
only goal but both ideal and normal (as if the normal and
the ideal have ever meant the same thing). The distinction
between normal and common, or standard, affects vision
measurement as it affects everything else in our lives (Dorothy
Parker once quipped that heterosexuality isn’t normal, it’s
just common). In establishing his 20/20 paradigm, Snellen
was identifying a standard metric, not offering a scientific
judgment on normal and abnormal vision.
The standard eye chart devised by Snellen is composed
of eleven lines. In most formats, the top line is a single letter.
Each subsequent line is smaller, each designed to indicate
a specific visual acuity, which also means a specific visual
deficit. Snellen devised his test to measure the actual viewer
(you) against an ideal viewer. In fractional notation, the top
line of the eye chart would be 20/200, which indicates that
the viewer has to be twenty feet away to see clearly something
that Mr. or Ms. 20/20 can see at two hundred feet. If the top
line of the Snellen chart is the only thing you can see with
corrective lenses then your Snellen fraction is 20/200, and
at least in the United States, you’re considered legally blind.
Snellen’s second line is 20/100—the patient has to be
twenty feet away from an object that the ideal 20/20 viewer
can see at 100 feet, or five times that distance. The third line
60
EYE CHART
is 20/70, the fourth 20/50, the fifth 20/40, the sixth 20/30, the
seventh 20/25, the eighth 20/20. If you can read the eighth
line down with corrective lenses, you’re at the 20/20 level.
Line nine indicates 20/15 vision: the viewer can see clearly
at twenty feet what the 20/20 viewer needs fifteen feet to see.
Line ten is 20/13, line eleven 20/10. The rare set of eyes that
can see clearly at 20/10 sounds like a miracle of nature, but
the animal kingdom—from eagles to insects—outdoes us in
many visual ways, so however good your vision is, it’s only
good human vision.
Understanding the fraction itself requires a bit of physics.
The numerator represents the distance from the object.
That’s easy: six feet, twenty feet, and so on. The denominator
is trickier: it’s the distance at which the viewer can see an
object measured at five minutes of arc. What is a minute of
arc? Think of what you can see when you look straight ahead
as a portion of a circle. That’s your field of view. Unless you’re
a cartoon character, you live in three dimensions and in a
given plane you stand in the center of 360 degrees. But your
field of view is only 114 degrees. Whatever you can see—no
matter how large or small, how near or far—can be measured
in terms of degrees of visual angle. Hold your arm out in
front of you. A little finger will measure a visual angle of
about one degree of arc. Three middle fingers measure about
five degrees of arc.
Each degree can be further divided into minutes of arc,
which is a sixtieth of a minute. (By the way, we can thank
the Babylonians for all this “sixty” business—the division of
Eleven Lines, Nine Letters
61
the hour into sixty minutes and sixty seconds. There’s a long
dotted line from Hammurabi, four thousand years ago, to
your most recent eye exam.)
The denominator of the Snellen fraction sets as its visual
goal a letter measured at five minutes of arc. It doesn’t make
any difference how large the letter “actually” is—it’s the angle
at which the image of the letter passes into the eye. (Walk
toward a distant tree and it looks larger. The tree stays the
same size, but its visual angle increases as it takes up a larger
and larger proportion of your field of vision. That’s the optical
principle at work.)
Snellen represented the relationship of viewer, distance,
and eyesight in this formula:
υ=
d
D
In this equation, v is the acuity of vision, d is the distance
from the eye chart, and D is the distance at which the viewer
can read an object at five minutes of arc.
Many eye charts include annotations either in the left
margin or the right or both, and each says something about
what the lines mean. Along the side of some charts you
might find a column of fractions; the most important is
the one everybody knows—the optometric notation 20/20,
which indicates that the viewer can see at twenty feet what is
expected of a person with good eyesight.
Your eye doctor marks out your prescription in a formula
unfamiliar to most people who wear glasses or contact
62
EYE CHART
lenses. Vision professionals measure the degree of correction
required in diopters, a unit of measurement you’re not likely
to encounter in any other circumstance.
The dictionary definition of diopter: “a unit of
measurement of the refractive power of lenses equal to the
reciprocal of the focal length in meters.”7 In simple terms, a
diopter is a unit of measurement indicating the power of the
lens necessary to bring the eye’s vision to the 20/20 standard.
If you look at the prescription you’re handed after an eye
exam, you’ll see three columns crossed with two rows, and
in those boxes are numbers—single digits marked plus or
minus. The diopter correction needed in a lens is indicated
by a positive number for nearsightedness and a negative
number for farsightedness. For example, a moderately
nearsighted eye might be prescribed a lens corrected at
-3.0, or three diopters, while a severely nearsighted eye
might require -5.0, or five diopters. Correction for mild
farsightedness might be indicated by, say, +1.0 diopters.
These corrections are indicated separately, first for one eye,
then the other. The eye chart doesn’t really examine your
eyes—it examines each eye, and your doctor records the
correction necessary.
Your prescription will have information for two forms
of correction, either spherical or cylindrical. The spherical
number gives information about eye strength and indicates
the diopters needed for the eye in all directions. The
cylindrical number gives information about astigmatism and
indicates the diopters needed for the eye along a particular
Eleven Lines, Nine Letters
63
axis. A third column provides further information on the
orientation of the correction.
E
An eye chart doesn’t tell the doctor everything about your
eyes, but it shows where things get blurry. It’s a common
misconception that the test for visual acuity is simply about
determining what degree of magnification is necessary, but
the vision test is concerned not only with magnification but
also with blurriness and sharpness of focus. Blur is a critical
concept in visual correction—it’s where the patient’s vision
becomes blurry that the eye chart is doing its work. Snellen
thought about blur when he chose his elements—eleven lines
of type and only nine letters—F D O C E P T Z L. Two vowels,
seven consonants. If you knew this, you wouldn’t guess Y or
R or H.
Those letters, always the same letters. There are languages
with almost as restricted a set of terms. Hawaiian, for example,
has only thirteen alphabetic letters (plus two non-alphabetic
markers). But Snellen’s nine letters are like the alphabet of
a lost and imposingly severe language: what can they spell?
Each line of letters seems deliberately constructed to avoid
sequences that might be read as phonemes. At the same time,
Snellen’s selection of letters has to present the viewer with
shapes that are sufficiently similar to invite misidentification.
Choosing between, say, an X and an O would be a lot easier,
and tell the examiner very little about the patient’s vision.
O and C are more of a challenge. Snellen’s letters are both
64
EYE CHART
specific and intentionally ambiguous, moving not only
downward into smaller and smaller point sizes but moving
into each other’s shape-space, too. Isn’t the O the uncanny C?
The F the uncanny P? The wholesome distinction between
X and O has given way to something subtler, something as
anxiety-provoking as modernity And by the way, what were
Freud’s eye examinations like?
Perhaps the most important, and surely the least
commonly known, feature of Snellen’s chart isn’t the size or
arrangement of the letter forms—it’s the disposition of the
letters themselves. Each letter is of equal width and height.
Snellen devised a chart with letters that could be mapped
onto a grid, as if each letter sat within an invisible box. It’s
hardly the most elegant solution to typographic design, but
Snellen believed that it equalized the letters, that it would
make the test’s results more reliable, and that it lent their
form a scientific authority. Unlike Jaeger’s test-types, Snellen’s
optotypes are built on an architectural model ensuring that
the body of the letter form has amplitude, filling out the
space of the grid in all directions.8 The gridded architecture
of Snellen’s letters— in their early design in the Egyptian
style and later on in their cleaner, sans serif forms—provided
more dependable readings. With all strokes of equal weight,
the examiner could discount the possibility that blurred
perception was the result of a narrow letter stroke.
If the letters on the modern eye chart look sort of oldfashioned, it’s partly because of that amplitude. Still, today’s
chart letters are stylish compared to Snellen’s originals. The
Eleven Lines, Nine Letters
65
first optotypi were designed in a style called Egyptian, a
term that is sometimes used to describe a class of typefaces
sharing certain design features, in particular the heavy—
or “slab”—serifs. An early eye chart set in “Egyptian”
uses letters outside the Snellen alphabetic canon (a B, an
N), evidence of the immediate variants on the prescribed
arrangement but showing the insistent griddedness of the
Snellen formula.
The Egyptian face was developed during the long
nineteenth-century fascination with Egyptomania, a heady
mixture of colonialism, anthropology, and philology. To
modern eyes, Snellen’s Egyptian Paragon is all about serifs.
If you look at it the right way, you can see in the serifed
letters the flat figuration of the human form as it appears
in Egyptian hieroglyphs. Egyptian Paragon looks kitschy
today, though unless you knew its name you might not
connect the typeface with Europe’s Orientalist dream. In
the seventeenth century, the Jesuit polymath Athanasius
Kircher published a series of heavily illustrated books
on vast subjects—the heavens, magnetism, China—
that included the earliest speculation that a form of the
Egyptian’s ancient writing might be connected to living
languages. Kircher couldn’t read hieroglyphics (the term
means “priestly writing”) but Father Kircher saw in these
symbols a puzzle worth our time.
That breakthrough had to wait until 1822, when JeanFrançois Champollion announced his decoding of the
Rosetta Stone’s hieroglyphic component. You can see the
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EYE CHART
Figure 5.1 Testing with Egyptian Paragon.
famous chunk of granodiorite any day you’re in London
where Rosetta is waiting for you at the British Museum,
with its inscriptions in Greek, demotic Egyptian, and
hieroglyphic. All three languages reproduce the same text,
and that simultaneity became the key to understanding
hieroglyphic as a language. The Rosetta Stone isn’t an eye
chart, except maybe in the broadest cultural sense.
Early attempts to free the Snellen chart of its serif clutter
failed: nineteenth-century audiences expected serifs in
display type, and when the serifs were removed they had to
be put back in—at least until the fashion passed altogether.
Eleven Lines, Nine Letters
67
E
There are other charts, other ways of measuring vision, too.
Snellen’s 1862 chart is the parent of innumerable variations.
For example, there’s the Tumbling E Chart, which consists only
of the capital letter E in each of its ninety-degree rotations.
The physician only needs to ask: which way does the E point?
Left? Down? Up? Right? It’s not what you would really call
“tumbling,” a verb you might associate with clowns or drunks.
No, the “tumbling” chart is just the opposite: the E moves
with military precision. Forward, backward, down, backward,
upward. If an E had boots you could hear its heels clicking.
The graphic arrangement known as the Landolt C is, like
the Tumbling E, particularly useful for the patient who cannot
name, or distinguish, the letters of the Roman alphabet we
English speakers take for granted. The Landolt C is a fat ring
with a cut into it, as if it were the letter C but much weightier.
This chart presents the patient with a series of broken rings,
with the opening pointing in one of eight directions. There may
be only one letter on view, but the bones of the Snellen chart
are here. Landolt C strips away Snellen’s alphabet and leaves us
with a diagnostic architecture—a tower, a warhead, a phalanx.
Landolt C was the creation of the Swiss-French
ophthalmologist Edmond Landolt (1846–1926), whose
admiration of Snellen I quoted earlier. As director of the
ophthalmological laboratory at the Sorbonne, Landolt worked
on some of the most important questions of the period. In his
lectures on the mechanics of the eye, Landolt demonstrated a
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EYE CHART
Figure 5.2 The Landolt C eye chart.
thorough knowledge of visual testing, including the work of
Snellen, with whom he had even collaborated on an important
scientific paper. Landolt saw many patients, among them
some of the greatest painters of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, including Degas and Monet, as well as
Cassatt, whose vision was seriously impaired by cataracts. No
matter how often you go to a museum and walk through an
Impressionist show you’ll be struck by the same thing: it’s not
just the color and the brushwork, it’s the seeing the color in
the world and imagining how to deliver some version of that
Eleven Lines, Nine Letters
69
world to the canvas. Did anyone ever see color better than
the Impressionists? Impressionism both depended upon
and demonstrated the operation of extraordinary vision.
Dr. Landolt was testing the visual acuity of some of the most
perceptive eyes we know.
What would it have been like to see with an Impressionist’s
eyes, to be a Cassatt or a Monet or a Degas, at least for a moment?
Surely we can see no more than what the paintings themselves
tell us about those artists’ eyes. Yet recent explorations of
visual analysis suggest that it might be possible to know more
about the visual acuity of an artist of the past, and in particular
a more precise knowledge of visual loss. Decades ago, viewers
speculated that El Greco’s elongated figures were an inevitable
result of visual impairment, but that crudely presented idea
has given way to more nuanced thinking about art and vision.
A recent article in a leading medical journal explores what we
might deduce about one Impressionist’s visual decline from
a careful examination of a surviving work.9 The case study
is Edgar Degas, whose history of eye troubles is well known
to art historians. New techniques in visual analysis suggest
that we can deploy “ophthalmological knowledge” to deduce
quite specific information about the quality of the artist’s
vision at a particular point in his life. The analysis is the work
of Dr. Michael Marmor, whose focus is Degas’s large Scene
from the Steeplechase: The Fallen Jockey, now in the National
Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
Degas painted The Fallen Jockey in 1866 and reworked
the canvas twice, first in 1880–81 and then again sometime
70
EYE CHART
Figure 5.3 Degas, The Fallen Jockey (detail).
around 1897. It’s an arresting composition, in part for the
varying degrees of specificity with which the artist has
rendered his subject.
Marmor’s project at first seems like a slightly crazy idea.
How can we really know what Degas saw other than by
looking at the resulting image painted on canvas? That’s
exactly the challenge his analysis takes up. By first positing
the distance at which Degas might have stood from his canvas
while painting, and studying the alterations the artist made
Eleven Lines, Nine Letters
71
in the work over time, Marmor proposes that the changes we
know in Degas’s technique aren’t simply a matter of late style
but the decline in his vision. Through computer technology,
Marmor argues,
images of the artwork can be defocused with Gaussian
blur to match the lines on a standard visual acuity chart
(using care to adjust for image size and viewing distance).
Several lines of evidence indicate that Degas’ visual acuity
was quite good before 1870 but fell to about 20/60 by
1880, 20/100 by 1890, and 20/200 by 1900.10
We can, in other words, imagine Edgar Degas’s eye-test score,
almost as if he was in the examining room, and chart the
decline of his vision from somewhere in the average range
down to 20/200 as cataracts interposed themselves between
his brain and his subject.
Other eye charts aim to serve different purposes. In the
1970s, the National Vision Research Institute of Australia
produced the logMAR chart.11 LogMAR, which stands for
the logarithm of the minimal angle of resolution, gets its
name from its principle of using logarithmic progression
in letter sizes. It’s sometimes called the Bailey-Lovie chart,
after its developers. It also is called Snellen, which it isn’t
quite, but while it charts its own path, the logMAR chart is
clearly a Snellen descendant.12 If the Snellen chart resembles
a pyramid, the logMAR chart looks like a badge.
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EYE CHART
The logMAR chart’s graphic advance is elegant because
it is simple. Instead of Snellen’s E-topped pyramid, each line
of the logMAR chart is a full row of letters. The advantage is
that the patient can be tested in the discrimination of shapes
across a cohesive set of letter forms. The logMAR chart may
be Snellen’s most widely used descendant. It’s designed in a
face called Sloan, developed in 1959 by Dr. Louise Sloan, a
physician at Johns Hopkins University, where she directed
the Low Vision Institute. Sloan letters are often mentioned in
the literature on vision testing.
Figure 5.4 The logMAR eye chart.
Eleven Lines, Nine Letters
73
There are lots of other charts, too, and each makes an
argument for a different approach to precision, offering a
different equalization of variables. Some have specialized
objects, like the EDTRS chart (not a chart for editors, though
editors should, like the rest of us, have their eyes checked).
EDTRS stands for Early Treatment Diabetic Retinopathy
Study. Like the logMAR format, the EDTRS format is
recognized for the reproducibility of its results, especially
important in winkling out the earliest evidence of retinal
damage resulting from diabetes.
There are eye charts of all sorts, diagnostically
sophisticated, graphically ambitious, crafted for particular
audiences. One of the most spectacular was designed in
the early twentieth century by George Mayerle, whose San
Francisco shop advertised the services of an “expert German
optician.”13
At the center of Mayerle’s chart are symbols for the
unlettered, culminating in an American flag, an eye, and
a simple black dot. To the right are Chinese, Russian and
Hebrew, to the left English, German (Fraktur type), and
Japanese. It’s a snapshot of a practicing optician’s clientele
in a vigorously polyglot San Francisco. Note especially the
Fraktur, which reflects Mayerle’s own identification as a
German physician. It also shows that a hundred years ago,
a German reader would be expected to depend on the Latin
alphabet as configured in the neo-Gothic format. Mayerle’s
chart was published in 1907, just after the San Francisco
earthquake.
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EYE CHART
Figure 5.5 The Mayerle eye chart (1907).
In the twenty-first century, Snellen may be diagnostically
quaint. Some medical professionals want to ditch Snellen
altogether, but it remains the ancestor of all distance-reading
tests. Tweak it or supersede it, the Snellen chart has had
many lives. And still does.
Eleven Lines, Nine Letters
75
76
6 Reading Up Close
We often read things at great distances: highway signs when
driving, of course, or the bus destination we try to decipher
as soon as its shape appears on the horizon. Is that taxi light
on, the one three blocks away? Most of what we read, though,
is inches from our eyes.
When you sit in your doctor’s office and are handed a
small card, you’ll be told to hold it at “a comfortable distance”
as if it were a book or newspaper, and read what you can.
This card is a descendant of the other, less celebrated eye
chart, the one conceived by Snellen’s contemporary Eduard
Jäger von Jaxtthal or, as he’s more frequently called, simply
Eduard Jaeger.
Jaeger was born in 1818 and died in 1884. His father,
also a medical man, had been personal physician to
Metternich. A specialist in problems of the eye, Jaeger Jr.
wanted to understand how well people actually read—a
book, the newspaper, a letter—and created a tool intended
to bring exactly that information to the surface. Jaeger
called his diagnostic Schrift-scalen or, in English, test-types.
Unlike Snellen’s chart, which arranged graduated letters in
a vertical pattern in order to test distance, Jaeger arranged
graduated text—excerpts of prose—to be held in the hand at
a comfortable (that word again) distance.
Jaeger’s test-types were first printed in booklet form in
Vienna in 1854, eight years before Snellen’s optotypi. Revised
and reissued many times, the test-types appeared in a tenth
edition in German, French, and English in 1909.1
Jaeger’s booklet consisted of a series of prose passages,
usually twenty, laid out in graduated size from barely
perceptible type, to type that could be read a room away.
Nineteenth-century copies of the Schrift-scalen are, like
all ephemera, fragile and rare artifacts. The New York
Academy of Medicine Library has a copy of the second
edition, published in Vienna in 1857. The booklet consists
of reading passages, not only in Jaeger’s native German, but
also in English, French, Italian, Dutch, Hungarian, Slovak
(“Böhmisch”), Russian, Greek, and Hebrew. Ten languages,
ten reading communities, and in that selection one can map
out a sense of Middle Europe in the polyglot middle of the
European nineteenth century. Jaeger’s Schrift-scalen booklet
is a reading world between two diagnostic covers.
What did Jaeger choose to have patients read? Surprisingly
complex and even lofty texts, it turns out. The numbered
passages are not only graduated in size, they’re readings
most likely accessible by people who have graduated from
university. Jaeger’s sources aren’t the point of the exam (he
doesn’t identify the works from which the passages are taken),
and teasing out the origins of Jaeger’s test-types would have
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eye chart
made for a frustrating game in the world before the internet.
Jaeger gave a few clues—authors’ surnames—which give us
a place to start. For German, French, and Italian passages—
maybe the three languages for which he anticipated the most
immediate use—each of twenty test-type samples comes
with an author’s name.
Here are famous writers: Schiller, Goethe, Jean Paul,
Wieland, Goethe again, Schiller again. Set in larger and
larger type, the test-types end with enormous letters. The
nineteenth of Jaeger’s sequence of German test-types lands
with finality on a passage from—who else?—Goethe.
It reads “Auch die Sorge ist eine Klugheit, wiewohl nur
eine passive.” (Even trouble is a kind of wisdom, though a
passive one). Jaeger must have thought a little philosophy
would make the eye exam a worthwhile investment of one’s
time. The passage is from the famous record of Goethe’s
table talk gathered as Conversations with Eckermann, one
Figure 6.1 A moment of Goethe in Jaeger’s test-types.
Reading Up Close
79
of the most celebrated of all interviews with a great writer.
The honors for the final selection—Jaeger’s No. 20—fall to
Schiller: “Der Geist besitzt nichts als was er thut.” The mind
(or spirit) possesses nothing except what it does (or makes
or accomplishes). Which was or wasn’t a comforting thought
to the patient.
The Italian excerpts get the same treatment, the author of
each numbered paragraph, each from a different text, being
identified at the end of that excerpt. Unlike the German
writers, the representative Italian authors chosen have not
aged well—journalists, patriots, dramatists—men of letters
caught in a literary tide that has since run out.
The English test-type passages are different: the twenty
graduated selections flow from one to the next, shaping a
single long excerpt for which there is only one signature—
Dickens—at the foot of the last, and largest, reading sample.
Figure 6.2 Testing vision with Schiller.
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eye chart
Set in type of different sizes, it’s a portion of Sketches by
Boz, which the young Dickens originally published in the
late 1830s. Stopping in mid-sentence, the test-type excerpt
ends with a cliffhanger to outdo even Dickens, himself a
frequent author of periodical installments and a master of
the suspended narrative gesture. Most of Jaeger’s languages
do just this, organizing all the passages in a continuous
sequence from one work. The choice of Goethe and Schiller
and Dickens—ruminations on philosophical questions or
excursions into character dialect—is typical of the reading
material in Jaeger’s tests, which pitch the sophistication of
the patient at a higher level than we might expect.
In 1868, a New York publisher issued an English-only
version of the test-type booklet, presenting the reader with
passages “corresponding to the Schrift-Scalen of Eduard
Jaeger.” In a preface, the publisher praises Jaeger, but lays
out the essential problem with Jaeger’s test-types: “Professor
Jaeger made a substantial contribution to our means of
diagnosis when he presented his series of test-letters. They
have, it is true, no more scientific system than a regular
gradation in size, yet in some respects they are quite as useful
as the more accurate tests which were suggested by them.”
The examining technique would involve bringing a
small-type passage—Jaeger’s test-type Number 1 or 2—
close to the viewer, then holding it at the point where it is
no longer easily readable, and noting the difference in the
two distances. Unlike Snellen, however, Jaeger resisted
establishing an ideal distance from which the texts should be
Reading Up Close
81
read, and that resistance, coupled with Snellen’s more rigid
protocol emphasizing a standard testing distance, gave the
Dutch eye chart a competitive advantage over Jaeger’s quite
different testing model.2 Yet fifty years after its appearance,
the Jaeger reading tests were still valued, even if the question
of precise measurement was far from settled.3
If Snellen’s chart came to be the most recognizable system
for visual testing, it wasn’t that Jaeger’s was superseded in the
process. Jaeger booklets gave way to test cards on the Jaeger
model, taking the original test-type idea, both streamlining it
and adding details. One Jaeger-style reading card even added
a few bars of piano music.
From a design perspective, the Jaeger booklets are
windows into the world of cold type, the period from
Gutenberg to the linotype machine when pieces of metal
were cast to minute specifications. Used copies can also
tell us what their users valued. One nineteenth-century
student of typography went carefully through a copy of
the Jaeger and annotated each reading selection in the
English-language pages. For every passage the reader
added a type size name—names unfamiliar to modern
ears. Some sound like alternate categories of traditional
wedding gifts: Pearl, Agate, Non-Pareil, Bourgeois—then
comes sizes once better known than they are today: Small
Pica, English, 6-line Pica, 7-line-Pica. Each is the familiar
name a printer might have used to describe the text on the
page. Marked with a readerly curiosity, this Jaeger booklet
records a lexicon of styles.4
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eye chart
Figure 6.3 Jaeger, and Jaeger with music.
Jaeger’s test-types have been a standard part of the
examination for more than a century. For those of us in
the humanities, and particularly those of us working in
literature, there’s a temptation to make a special kind of
distinction between Jaeger’s handheld card of sample texts
and Snellen’s letter chart, suspended twenty feet away.
Snellen and Jaeger, far and near: it’s a partnership in visual
evaluation techniques that recalls a well-known pedagogical
practice. That focus—intensive attention to the words,
Reading Up Close
83
patterns, forms, and tone of a piece of writing—is what
we’ve been taught to do in English classes. It’s called—with
no implication of myopia—close reading.
Close reading has a literary history that goes back
to the critical work of I. A. Richards and T. S. Eliot in
the early decades of the twentieth century. It became the
default analytic protocol of literary criticism in the postwar era. We’ve all been brought up on close reading in
one form or another, learning to observe, and consider
closely, a passage, a line, a word, focusing on rhythm and
rhyme, metaphors and repetition, before rushing ahead
to symbols and meanings. The parallels between literary
reading practice and medical diagnosis are there for the
taking. Read slowly, look for evidence, take notes, work
from a standard whenever possible, pay specific attention
to what seem like small variations and minor details, look
for the ways in which what is unremarkable might, with
a closer look, tell us something, and above all, listen to
what the patient—or the text—has to say. But don’t rely
on only what the patient or the text has to say. That’s close
reading, and it’s how we’re taught to read poetry, the most
complex, resistant, and suggestive form of word-making
we have. Social formation, politics, psychoanalysis, gender
theory—all have given close reading a run for its money,
but not in order to make us stop reading closely. On the
contrary, these ways of thinking, often described blandly as
“approaches to literature,” depend on close reading in order
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eye chart
to go further. Close reading never was the only way to think
about literature.
We’re not exactly beyond close reading today, but
computers have altered everything about our lives,
including how we study literary texts. With the rise of
computational criticism and data mining—more generally
“digital humanities,” more succinctly “DH”—we’ve been
encouraged to think about massive amounts of textual data
under the rubric of “distant reading.” A distant reading
project might, for example, look at the way a thousand
novels that concern marriage—regardless of whether
they’re masterpieces or read-and-toss mediocrities—talk
about money. It’s big-picture thinking that wants the view
from thirty thousand feet. How many marriage plots in
nineteenth-century American fiction, including in books
nobody has read since, end in financial ruin? Could that tell
us something about how people imagined the complexities
of domestic structures?
If we think of these approaches to literature as ways to
engage reading through a text’s context, the practices of
distant and close reading suddenly echo what happens in
an eye exam. Snellen and Jaeger would be surprised to hear
these literary terms, or at least puzzled as to what close and
distant mean beyond their own diagnostic procedures, but
the parallels are available if we look for them. Emphasizing
distance, Snellen’s chart asks for a kind of absolute reading—a
single letter, picked out of white space, recognized by curve
Reading Up Close
85
and stroke, and meaning nothing. As a consequence, Snellen’s
chart feels like reading in the laboratory.
Jaeger’s test-types do something different. It’s not just
that the test-type diagnoses visual acuity with a smaller
distance between eye and object. Instead of Snellen’s absolute
protocol, Jaeger tests visual acuity while acknowledging the
importance of context. You read a word by recognizing it,
or parts of it, and you move along to the next one, drawing
upon everything you know about how sentences work and
what part of speech is most likely to follow. It is, of course,
what we mean by reading in the ordinary sense.
E
Today we’re likely to look at Jaeger’s work with different
eyes. If the test-type booklet hadn’t been invented when it
was, it could have been a writing project of the avant-garde
Oulipo group, which experimented within idiosyncratic and
self-imposed rules. Georges Perec composed an entire novel,
translated into English as A Void, without ever using the letter
“e.” Another Oulipo figure, the Italian writer Italo Calvino,
who died in 1985 at the age of sixty-one, is admired for a
stylistic invention that comes closest to what the test-type
booklet seems to offer. In his fiction If on a Winter’s Night a
Traveller (1979), Calvino offered the reader a complex set of
narrative half-gestures. The work’s plot, such as it seems to
be, is composed of a series of stories, each of which breaks off
without resolution before the next begins. With its sequence
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eye chart
of doors that open without ever closing, Calvino’s fiction
inhabits the postmodern world of the dream narrative. Yet
it also recalls the test-type’s dreamlike passage through one
language and into the next, from Dutch to Hungarian to
Slovak.
One 1875 test-type booklet has its own dreamy
movement from one language to another, as it shows
off passages imagined to be good diagnostic tools in the
decade after the American Civil War. It’s a strange menu
of writers. The Latin text is from Tacitus, the German
from the popular romantic writer Heinrich Heine. Other
names we are much less likely to know. For the French
text, the needed paragraphs are plucked from Rodolphe
Toepffer, an early nineteenth-century Swiss writer and
caricaturist. In 1837 Toepffer published Histoire de M.
Vieux Bois—the story of Mr. Old Wood—a small volume
compiled of illustrated panels accompanied by text. It’s
sometimes referred to as the first comic book.5 The Italian
excerpt is by Silvio Pellico, a pre-Risorgimento writer and
patriot. During his lifetime Pellico was known for his
Le mie prigioni (My Prisons), a memoir of his decade of
incarceration as punishment for supporting the Italian
nationalists. The Dutch example is drawn from the writings
of Simon Styl, a late eighteenth-century writer and author
of De opkomst en bloei der Vereenigde Nederlanden (The
Rise and Flowering of the United Netherlands), published
in 1774.6
Reading Up Close
87
The booklet’s entry for an English text by John Lothrop
Motley, a nineteenth-century American diplomat who
traveled, raised a family and, apparently without a command
of the Dutch tongue, wrote popular histories of the Dutch
republic. The passage here is from one of Motley’s books on his
favorite subject: the indomitable spirit of the Dutch. It begins:
The Gallic tribes fell off and sued for peace. Even the
Batavians became weary of the hopeless contest, while
fortune, after much capricious hovering, settled at last
upon the Roman side. Had Civilis been successful, he
would have been deified, but his misfortunes, at last,
made him odious in spite of his heroism. But the Batavian
was not a man to be crushed, nor had he lived so long
in the Roman service to be outmatched in politics by the
barbarous Germans. He was not to be sacrificed as a peaceoffering to revengeful Rome. Watching from behind the
Rhine the progress of defection and the decay of national
Would a twenty-first-century eye exam asking the patient
to read the sequence “while fortune, after much capricious
hovering, . . . .”? As with other test-type samples, the Motley
excerpt is enough to make us wonder at the reading level and
sophistication of individuals undergoing nineteenth-century
visual accuracy tests.
The Jaeger test-types brought real reading into the
diagnostic process, and acknowledging, in its multiple
languages, that reading words is always more complex than
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eye chart
reading symbols, even when those symbols are alphabetic.
When we sit for an eye exam, we can hold the Jaeger-style
card at a comfortable distance, as the doctor asks us to, and
we can read off the passages provided, whether they’re about
Roman battles, goodness in a fragile world, or some other
less sensational subject. But there’s no escaping the beautiful
strangeness of the Jaeger test-types, where language is made
to do very unlanguage-y things.
The test-type document is a piece of performance art in
a lab coat.
Reading Up Close
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90
7 Looking for
Trouble
Go to the website for the retail company The Sharper Image
and you’ll find products that purify your air, offer you a
massage, make your car more technologically fashionable,
assist you in mastering your backyard, entertain your kids,
and ennoble your man cave. There are also eyeglasses. Lots
of them: foldaway glasses, polarizing glasses, glasses to help
you find your golf ball, glasses made for long hours in front
of computer games. If you’re someone who enjoys reality
so much that you want to reexperience it immediately, The
Sharper Image offers sunglasses with a covert video recorder
so you can film what you see as you’re watching it and play
it back later. The sharpness of the image is one of the selling
points of the company’s eyewear line, but generally speaking
the firm’s profile suggests that you’ll also look sharp if you
buy these goods.
Sharpness of vision is what the eye chart measures. With
its economical format and ingenious system of measurement,
Snellen’s project offered a simple way to categorize degrees
of visual sharpness. Armed with that information, eye
care professionals could advise on how to compensate for
weakness and astigmatism. Lenses could be crafted to help
the viewer see more clearly—not to make the image larger,
but to make it sharper.
It seems, however, that sharpness of vision was not always
without its drawbacks. In fact, it could be a symptom.
One of the most famous and influential figures in the
history of criminology was the Italian physician Cesare
Lombroso. Born in 1835, Lombroso proposed a theory
of criminal atavism. Criminals, Lombroso argued, were
reversions to primitive human states. In 1876, Lombroso
published L’uomo delinquente (Criminal Man), the work that
would define his career. Lombroso understood the criminal
mind within a powerful, and gloomily fatalistic, view of
human character. There had been earlier attempts to identify
the physical characteristics of the criminal, the depraved,
and the insane. Nineteenth-century fiction is full of such
caricatures. Lombroso offered system.
Lombroso, determined to prove that the tendency to
criminal behavior could be seen in the shape of a person’s
face and head, would develop the idea further, making use
of advances in the new medium of photography to secure
what he believed was a visual vocabulary of criminal types.
(“Black” and “Mongol” were negative categories Lombroso
deployed as a means of defining progress.) Cataloging
headshots of convicted persons, Lombroso proposed a kind
of somatic lexicon of corruption. Those who were “born bad”
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eye chart
would have physical characteristics—a sloping forehead,
asymmetrical features, distended ears, snub noses—that
were clues to inherent criminal tendencies. Features of the
criminal type had to be measured, identified, and used as
predictive tools. Lombroso’s methods of “detection,” while
not uncontroversial even in his own time, had a powerful
effect on the study of criminal behavior.
If criminals were different from the rest of us, did their
sensory organs operate differently? Under the terms of analysis
Lombroso was developing, even unusually good eyesight
could be associated with bad behavior. Did the criminal see
as well as the honest citizen? To this end, Snellen’s eye chart
was enlisted for the purpose of identifying criminal types. A
late nineteenth-century Dictionary of Psychological Medicine
notes how murderers and thieves scored on a Snellen test:
Ottolenghi examined 100 criminals with Snellen’s types
in the open air, using various precautions to ensure
uniformity and accuracy. The results were –
Visus (average) for
82 thieves = 1.8
“
“
18 homicides = 2.2
“
“
100 criminals = 2.0
In one of the homicides sight was very keen (V = 3).1
The protocol— “various precautions” and all—was designed
to uncover measurable data concerning criminal vision.
In a small sample of one hundred individuals, murderers
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93
are confidently presented as one single class of person and
thieves as another class (what about someone who had stolen
and later killed? were all persons convicted of homicide
really comparable?). Presumably the figures reported above
are slightly higher than what the innocent man or woman
might be “expected” to achieve. But it’s the fundamental
categorizability of the criminal that seems most remarkable.
The conclusion: murderers had measurably sharper vision
than thieves. The report even picks out one exception of a
gimlet-eyed killer whose vision is unusually sharp—a sort
of data-driven exclamation point. Perhaps the criminal with
better-than-average vision could be capable of the worst
crime possible.
Lombroso’s ideas gave credence to a scientistic obsession
with pinpointing the features common to those who were
found guilty of violating the law. The theory produced all
sorts of gradients and tests. Murderers might score well on
the Snellen test, but not all senses within the criminal body
were “heightened.” Tests evaluated such sensory capacities
as the criminal’s “gustatory obtuseness”—presumably,
the lack of a refined palate. (One can only wonder at the
discriminations of taste convicts were asked to make.) The
examinations also reported on the extent of criminals’
sexual precocity, darkly described as being “both in natural
and unnatural forms.”2
Lombroso’s analytic procedures should strike us (as they
did some of his contemporaries) as ripe with class and race
prejudice, but his efforts uncomfortably foreshadow modern
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eye chart
fears of invasive surveillance. Between Michel Foucault’s
all-seeing panopticon and the iPhone that tracks your
every move there was the Lombroso school of criminology,
encouraging a belief that complete knowledge of the criminal
mind and the criminal body—maybe of every mind and of
every body—was a necessary precondition of public safety.
Lombroso’s ideas now seem part of our bad eugenicist past
if not our surveillance-mad present. In its attention to detail,
however, especially the details made newly available by the
camera’s reliable output, the Italian criminologist’s work
might be looked at in a slightly different way. Although the
conclusions may be unconvincing, Lombroso’s project was
about attention to detail. Photography made that attention
newly possible.
This system of visual categorization has a distant
resonance with the connoisseurship of the American
art historian Bernard Berenson, Lombroso’s younger
contemporary. Born Bernard Valvrojenski in Lithuania in
1865, Berenson was one of the most influential authorities
on Italian Renaissance art. He exhibited what the Gilded
Age millionaires admired and rewarded: a confident ability
to determine the authorship of Old Masters. Berenson drew
upon the investigative technique pioneered by art historian
Giovanni Morelli (not coincidentally, Morelli was also a
medical man and a teacher of anatomy). Berenson’s skill
and his success in promoting it made him among the most
important art advisors of the early twentieth century, one of
the Great Ages of Collecting. Following Morelli, Berenson’s
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95
technique was in part grounded in his observation of details
that others overlooked, as in the case of his famous attention
to fingers and hands in works that might or might not be
by Botticelli. Where lesser critics pored over the face of a
Madonna, Berenson looked where he believed the painter,
whoever it might be, thought the viewer wouldn’t be looking.
Berenson and Lombroso, criminologist and connoisseur,
shared an aptitude for symptomology, attending to details
that might be overlooked by other less keen observers. In
their different ways, they were close readers.
E
The year 1900 fell within a decade rich for the interpretative
arts, the sciences, and the pseudosciences, too. In that year,
Lombroso’s major work was translated into English, and
Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams. Freudian
psychoanalysis was charting a guide to the mind’s crawlspaces,
and like Lombroso and Berenson, the Viennese doctor’s
methods depend upon attention to unobserved details.
Their projects remind us how readable the body became—or
appeared to have become. Berenson read fingers, Lombroso
foreheads and ear shape and visual acuity, and Freud read
language, the space where dreams and anxieties are written
out in speech.
What the patient said about a dream became a way to
determine what the patient could not otherwise say. Dream
interpretation was a semi-magical procedure with a pedigree
going back to the Bible and beyond, but Freud proposed
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eye chart
that what could not be seen—or known—by the conscious
patient could be released—seen—through careful analysis
of dreams as restructured through spoken language. What
thrilled Vienna and the world about Freud’s project was the
revelation of the concealed, the thing that was always present
but invisible: a trauma, a fear, a desire, a memory. Freud’s
archive of encounters with his patients, recounted in The
Interpretation of Dreams and the cases of Dora, Anna O the
Wolf Man, and other patients, are documents of vision—not
the kind that the eye chart tests, but vision nonetheless.
In Freud’s century, complex secrets were there for
discovery. One of the most famous is the Rorschach test,
those folded sheets in which mirrored blotches of ink did
or did not appear to the viewer to be a butterfly or a penis.
The Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach had been
working to develop a test for diagnosing schizophrenia.
Psychodiagnostik, the work on which his reputation would be
based, was published in 1921. Rorschach died the following
year at age thirty-seven. His testing protocol, based on a series
of inkblot images, was developed and extended further by his
followers. Hermann Rorschach didn’t singlehandedly invent
the idea of puzzling over blobs (though as a Freudian he knew
that sometimes a blob isn’t just a blob), but he brought the
procedure to a new level of visibility and celebrity. Rorschach
had made of ink splotches a kind of Freudian eye chart.
The process of producing artistic images out of inkblots
is called klecksography, from the German word klecks, or
inkblot, which had been the basis of a children’s game. (The
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97
young Rorschach knew the game, evidently well enough that
he earned the nickname “Klex.”3) The Rorschach test became
part of twentieth-century psychological testing, though not
uncontroversially, and one of popular culture’s windows
into diagnostic treatment. Who knew what the blots meant
or could reveal? One of the best-known examples is Daniel
Keyes’s 1959 short story “Flowers for Algernon,” about
Charlie, a mentally disabled man whose intelligence scores
improve dramatically when he becomes an experimental
subject. Charlie is given a sequence of examinations, one of
the first being what he calls a “raw shok” test. It wasn’t until
the candy-colored 1960s that a public fascination with the
Rorschach test made the inkblots a topic of broad interest.
Social attitudes have moved on, but the Rorschach test
has never really gone away. In 2009 the Watchmen graphic
novel series was made into a film, bringing to the screen the
story’s vigilante antihero, Rorschach. If your name is already
Rorschach, everything is a test. Today you can buy Rorschach:
The Inkblot Party Game, which comes in a box whose front
panel redundantly exclaims “Perfect for Parties!” There is no
Snellen Party Game, though it’s surely only a lack of attention
on the part of the games manufacturers that’s spared us some
ages-18-and-up version of an eye test. It would be perfect for
parties.
E
Modern diagnosis is all about looking for the point of
weakness, and if trouble follows, the means of addressing it.
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eye chart
Compared to psychoanalysis, inkblots, and photographicbased pseudoscience, Snellen’s eye chart feels pretty benign.
The serious work of assessing eye problems remains in the
hands of the ophthalmologist, peering into the organ itself.
Retinas are detached, cataracts thicken the lens and shut out
light. The eye chart is an inadequate tool for assessing, much
less correcting, these conditions. Still, we tend to think of eye
trouble as reducible to what eyeglasses can correct.
If poor vision needed a mascot there could be no more
familiar spokesperson than the genial and irascible Mr.
Magoo. Created in 1949 by the animation group UPA,
Mr. Magoo is a gentleman of a certain age, short, bald,
and nearsighted. Neatly dressed and infinitely curious,
Mr. Magoo explores the world around him, his cheerful
disposition broken only by moments of frustration that pass
as quickly as summer rain. Unlike the animated zoo of mice
and bunnies and coyotes, Mr. Magoo was always human, and
his adventures owe more to the world of silent comedy gods
like Buster Keaton than to the Disney empire of ingenious
fauna. Magoo was popular enough to be cast as Scrooge in
an animated version of Dickens’s Christmas classic; the 1962
featurette Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol still reemerges, in all
its period glory, at holiday time.
The world of Mr. Magoo is shaped by his inability to
see what’s staring him in the face. Marcelo’s leg of mutton
problem as recounted by Daza in the seventeenth century is
Mr. Magoo’s everyday modern experience, with the difference
that there’s nobody to tell Quincy Magoo he’s made a terrible
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99
mistake, and even if there were, Mr. Magoo would brush it
off. The actor Jim Backus made Mr. Magoo come alive, giving
him one of the most distinctive voices in animated film and
making Magoo one of the most recognizable animated
characters of the 1960s. Mr. Magoo’s delight in the world he
can hardly see protects him from his own limitations, but the
narratives that could be built around the struggle of Magoo
vs. World delighted in the possibility that humans, in all our
limitations, still endure. In 1957, Mr. Magoo won the first of
his two Oscars (the award went to Stephen Busustow, who
produced not only the winning cartoon but all three of the
nominees in that category). In the cartoon “Mr. Magoo’s
Puddle Jumper,” our nearsighted hero buys a car—an antique
electric car, at that—and takes his nephew Waldo for a ride.
Figure 7.1 Mr. Magoo negotiates an unlikely eye chart.
100 eye chart
Magoo drives straight into the ocean. As he motors along,
Magoo’s running commentary on the underwater traffic and
the state of Beverly Hills is an in-joke for the Hollywood
community. It’s a nice detail that Mr. Magoo was a college
graduate—a Rutgers man—with the sort of raccoon-coat
spirit that once stood for uncomplicated alumni fervor. But
even Mr. Magoo had to face the diagnostic music, as he does
here in this eye test.
The exam he faces has been dreamed up by the animators,
and despite the format, it’s an improbable, and quite unSnellenian, selection of letters. Unlike us in the non-animated
world, Magoo’s reading of the eye chart has no consequences
at all. Beside, Mr. Magoo’s eye trouble makes our own a little
easier to endure. He’s an optometric Everyman, crankysweet, playing out our own unresolvable encounter with the
visible world.
Looking for Trouble 101
102
8 Eye Terror
We know what’s involved: the drops, the waiting, the blurred
vision, the concern that one’s eyes have weakened (by how
much? is this normal at my age?). One might be anxious
during an eye test, but things could be much, much worse.
E. T. A. Hoffmann, the Prussian-born writer who gave
children The Nutcracker and adults nightmares, published
“The Sandman” in 1816. It is, among many other things, a
masterpiece of the horror-fantasy genre, as disturbing as
Kafka’s stories would be a century later, and it is all about
vision and eyeglasses.
In “The Sandman,” Nathanael is a young man obsessed
with a strange figure who comes to the family home, has
heated conversation with his father, and in the ensuing
events precipitates the father’s death. The visitor, or his
doppelgänger, reappears in the young man’s life, now as
a seller of artificial eyes and pocket spyglasses. When a
mysterious figure and his daughter move in next door, the
young man becomes attracted to the strangely immobile
young woman he can see at the window. Nathanael meets
her at a dance and is enraptured, forgetting his beloved
Clara. We discover that the daughter is an automaton, and
her eyes artificial, but Nathanael alone cannot see that the
“daughter” is not alive.
Struggling to maintain his fragile sanity, Nathanael
prepares to depart the town with Clara. They climb the town
hall’s tower for one last view. But as in Hitchcock’s Vertigo,
bad things happen in towers. Seeing once again the strange
figure that has obsessed him, Nathanael first tries to kill Clara
and, failing, throws himself over the edge.
Hoffmann’s story concentrates on the protagonist’s dread
and the uncanny appearance, or presumed appearance, of
a single, menacing figure at different points in Nathanael’s
short life. The artificial girl, and the mechanism that
controls her, are critical to Hoffmann’s development of his
protagonist. What about those sightless artificial eyes? What
kind of vision is this story describing?
A work of fiction is not an appliance, but this particular
tale has gained fame for the diagnostic use to which Freud
put it in his 1919 essay “The Uncanny.” For Freud, the
uncanny is the thing that is both familiar and unfamiliar,
both heimlich—homely, familiar—and unheimlich, meaning
the opposite. A doppelgänger is both familiar and unfamiliar,
and so a source of terror. That terror, however, is of a
particularly powerful and persistent kind because it brings
the frightened person not to any alien environment but to
the most alien of all environments: home.
104 eye chart
Dreamlike in its jarring episodic structure, “The Sandman”
has been adapted many times, with each adaptation watering
down the disjunctive form in which Hoffmann tells his tale.
Hoffmann’s original narrative, on the other hand, is riddled
with ulcers or holes, the sort of deficits that would, were a
text a physical body, be compensated with prostheses. The
augmented body, the artificial body, the appliance: these
theatrically rich materials ground the ballet classic Coppélia
(1870) with its score by Léo Delibes, or Jacques Offenbach’s
much admired opéra fantastique, Les contes d’Hoffmann (The
Tales of Hoffmann), given its premiere in 1881. In Offenbach’s
opera the protagonist, also called Hoffmann, recounts three
tales of thwarted (or, more exactly, perverted) love, the
first focusing on the beautiful Olympia, a figure revealed
to be a doll just moments before she is destroyed in what is
essentially a custody battle between her male creators.
The English filmmaking team of Michael Powell
and Emeric Pressburger made the French opera into a
hauntingly strange English-language film.1 The opera and
film, and in some productions the Coppélia ballet, play
out the theme of artificial eyes. When in the film version
Olympia is destroyed, our last sight of her is a mechanical
head lying amid the wreckage of the doll’s body parts. The
character of Olympia is an automaton, but the head belongs
to the dancer Moira Shearer, who has performed the role.
The music stops. We hear only the ticking of gears. Both
lifeless and never alive, Olympia’s head dares us to police the
Eye Terror 105
boundary between body and machine while her eyes stare
sightlessly out at viewers.
E
Hoffmann’s story and its adaptations in succeeding
generations are part of the nineteenth century’s fascination
with the horror of vision—the sightlessness of the automaton’s
eyes, the possibility of sight beyond sight, the danger not
only of blindness but of its opposite, the inability not to see.
And in these anxieties, technology and fantasy converge. In
1895, Wilhelm Röntgen, a German mechanical engineer and
physicist, accidentally discovered an unfamiliar frequency
that he named X. The first image Röntgen produced was an
x-ray of his wife Anna’s hand (“I have seen my death,” she
is reported to have said). X-rays were quickly deployed—
in medical exams, in carnivals, and for quotidian tasks
such as measuring people’s feet for correct shoe sizes. Five
years after Röntgen’s discovery, Freud published his study
of his patients’ dreams. Suddenly, there were two powerful
diagnostic systems for exploring the interior, and neither
without complications.
In 1897, midway between the breakthroughs of Röntgen
and Freud, H. G. Wells published The Invisible Man, a work
that quickly became a classic of science fiction. In Wells’s
novella, a mysterious character called Griffin arrives at an
English village, completely muffled in clothing from head to
toe. We learn that Griffin is a scientist who has experimented
with a formula for invisibility, and only by being wrapped can
106 eye chart
we see him or—in language we would learn some decades
later from particle physics—the evidence of his presence.
The story develops as a drama that ends with Griffin’s death.
He is stripped, his naked body materializing at last. In the
1933 film version of The Invisible Man, the actor Claude
Rains, who plays the title character, is invisible throughout
the drama, materializing only in the last shot. The attending
physician warns, “His body will become visible as life goes.”
And in fact, as life goes, the viewer is transformed into a
diagnostician in reverse, glimpsing first the skull, then the
external features of the now peacefully dead title character.
Rains’s voice is with us throughout the film, but his face
appears only in the film’s final moment.
Figure 8.1 The invisible man’s deathbed visibility.
Eye Terror 107
Wells, however, describes Griffin’s death with greater
visual violence:
When at last the crowd made way for Kemp to stand erect,
there lay, naked and pitiful on the ground, the bruised
and broken body of a young man about thirty. His hair
and beard were white—not grey with age, but white with
the whiteness of albinism, and his eyes were like garnets.
His hands were clenched, his eyes wide open, and his
expression was one of anger and dismay.2
Since the moment of Röentgen’s discovery of mysterious
emanations and the development of an important diagnostic
tool, the mechanism quickly took its place as a visual joke.
Countless animated films and cartoons depicted the patient
(or a cat, a goldfish, anything with an unseeable internal
structure) behind an x-ray machine. The subject’s body,
extending beyond the device, would be recognizable, but
the mechanism would cover a crucial area—the chest, the
stomach, the head—revealing some secret within. X-rays
reveal Homer Simpson’s secret: he has a crayon stuck so far
up his nose that it has lodged in his brain. Surgeons remove
it. Then they put it back in.
The x-ray is a form of non-human vision, capable of
mimicking the organ of sight but revealing much, much
more, maybe too much. It’s a common feature of imaginative
writing about x-rays that the penetrating waves emanate
from someone’s eyes. Why dream up an x-ray wristwatch
108 eye chart
or belt buckle when the eyes themselves offer such an
irresistible locus of inhuman power? Superman, Earth’s most
welcome extraterrestrial and the most famous of the modern
era’s superheroes, demonstrates again and again the not
unproblematic status of his abilities. In February 1942, during
the height of the Second World War, Clark Kent attempts to
enlist in military service, but he doesn’t pass the physical. Yes,
he’s “physically superb,” the doctor assures him, but he’s failed
the eye test. How is this possible? A caption box explains:
GLANCING AT THE WALL, CLARK DISCOVERS
THE ANSWER—IN HIS PREOCCUPIED STATE HE
HAD INADVERTENTLY GLANCED THROUGH
THE WALL BY MEANS OF HIS X-RAY VISION, AND
READ THE LETTERING ON AN EYE CHART IN THE
ADJOINING ROOM!
Figure 8.2 Superman fails an eye test.
Eye Terror 109
It wouldn’t be quite the same revelation in upper- and
lowercase letters. Clark might not even notice, though, what
we can see: the eye chart he was supposed to read is, strangely
enough, composed of letters in alphabetical order—something
a good eye chart would never do. (Superman and Mr. Magoo
may have the same optometrist.) We may have lived with
psychoanalysis too long for us not to read internal conflict into
Clark’s misreading, but Superman did soon go on to battle the
“Japanazis,” as the comics world dubbed the Axis forces.
In Roger Corman’s eminently low-budget 1963 film X, Ray
Milland plays a doctor who develops a formula for eye drops
that produce x-ray vision. We see him first experimenting on
a small laboratory monkey, but the animal dies shortly after
demonstrating that the serum basically does what the doctor
wants it to. Milland’s character, Dr. James Xavier, makes the
researcher’s sacrifice and turns himself into the first human
subject, becoming a man with x-ray vision.
Corman’s soft thriller gives us Dr. Xavier discovering his
powers—looking through women’s clothing at a dance party
(the camera is so discreet that it’s hard to imagine a less
prurient exploitation of this visual superpower—and Xavier
reminds us that he is a doctor, after all). Now he’s diagnosing
a child’s medical condition without the trouble of an internal
examination, now he’s seeing otherwise imperceptible
broken ribs. But while Dr. Xavier’s diagnostic power grows,
there’s a downside. His condition is unstable, and his eyes
increasingly see the world as a dizzying explosion of moiré
patterns (X delivers its visuals before the era of CGI).
110 eye chart
At the film’s turning point, Xavier demonstrates his ability
by reading a Snellen chart—or rather by reading through
it. Facing the familiar graphic test, Xavier gets everything
wrong. Or so it seems, until the examining physician lifts the
hinged eye chart to reveal a second, different Snellen chart
underneath. (Do hinged Snellen charts exist? What would
their purpose be?) Like Superman peering into the next room,
Xavier has been reading the chart below the one visible to us.
There’s an argument, a struggle, and Xavier accidently
pitches his colleague through a plate glass window, sending
him many stories down to his death. In a moment, Milland’s
character becomes what he was destined to be—a noir
protagonist on the run. He holds up in a cheap circus run by
Don Rickles, working mind-reading tricks (or, in this case,
demonstrations of extra sight). There Xavier is compelled
to perform a parody of medical consultation. Ordinary
people of modest means are brought to see the remarkable
diagnostician for whatever they can afford to pay. We see the
unwealthy sick lined up, and Rickles happily pocketing two
bucks now from this patient, now that one. It’s a combination
of the modern museum’s pay-what-you-wish and devotional
attendance at a miraculous site—the democratic gesture of
socialized medicine tempered by the physical discretion
of a psychoanalytic session. The whole thing is a sham. Or
is it? Milland’s Xavier sits opposite the patient, looks, and
pronounces—to the patient it’s a miracle, but Xavier is only
reading the marks within the stranger’s body, and he does it
reluctantly and with a desperate sense of endgame.
Eye Terror 111
In the inevitable last chase with the police, Xavier is
speeding along down a California highway shadowed by
a helicopter. With his eyes working overtime, he’s almost
blinded by his capacity for extraordinary vision. Somehow
he escapes one last time, only to arrive suddenly at an
evangelical’s tent rally. Religion, judgment, the end-limit
experience of vision: the film’s final moments invoke, as if
inevitably, the fifth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew with
its admonition to pluck out the eye that offends you. Which
is apparently what happens in the abrupt last shot, as we see
Xavier in close-up, his eye sockets glowing red.
Released with an explanatory subtitle (X: The Man with
the X-Ray Eyes), Corman’s film larks through two favorite
themes of mid-century popular culture—the ability to be
invisible, and the ability to see what cannot be seen. They’re
two sides of one scopophilic coin. Superman (born 1938) is
the best known of the superheroes endowed with hypervisual
powers. (A slightly earlier female character, Olga Mesmer,
demonstrated her x-ray vision in Spicy Mystery Stories,
which ran from 1937 to 1938.) The decades since Superman
have produced numerous superheroes endowed with visual
capacities whose unnatural range resets the expectation of
what superpowers must now be.
Today the seeable and the unseeable are partners of our
imaginary—and political—engagements with the world.
The invisibility of the body may not be a practical reality in
everyday life, but technological advancements are constantly
expanding our ability to be present in absentia. Nowhere is
112 eye chart
invisibility more prized than in military operations, where
the “invisible” aircraft and the pilotless drone play out with
deadly seriousness the dual visual states of x-ray capability
and visual undetectability.
E
The x-ray developed rapidly as a diagnostic tool and a source
of anxious visual humor, but before cartoon cats showed us
their rib cages, there was Marcel Proust and A la recherche
du temps perdu.
In Du côté de chez Swann (1913), the first installment in
Proust’s masterwork beyond genre, Marcel recalls a visit to
his aunt Léonie, whose physical condition has reduced her
to living in two rooms, attended by her servant Françoise.
Conversation turns to a visit Françoise might make to her
married daughter. The servant conceals the tension between
herself and her son-in-law, but to Françoise’s astonishment,
Marcel’s mother acknowledges the problem, discreetly and
sympathetically. Françoise cannot contain her surprise:
“Madame knows everything. Madame is worse than the
x-rays” (she said x with an affected difficulty and a smile,
mocking herself—an ignorant woman—for using this
learned term) “that they brought for Mme Octave and that
see what you have in your heart.”3
Françoise goes away, perhaps to hide her tears, and the
narrator tells us that his mother is the first person who has
made Françoise feel that anyone might be interested in her
emotions and her inner life. Maman is, in other words, the
Eye Terror 113
x-ray diagnostician of the heart that Françoise imagines to be
the purpose of the new technology.
The x-ray is only one feature of what the French film critic
Christian Metz named the scopic regime, a term now used
to identify endless variations on seeing what cannot be or
is not meant to be seen. Corrected vision, the x-ray, and
the dream of invisibility are all connected, if not by straight
lines, within the scopic regime of modernity. Of these, the
dream of invisibility may be the oldest desideratum—maybe
only the dream of flight is an older one. We have dreamed
of invisibility at least since we were able to recount our
dreams in language. In the republic, Plato deploys the myth
of a magic ring that conveys invisibility on its wearer. In the
nineteenth century, Richard Wagner made the tarnhelm,
a magical headpiece that conveys invisibility as well as the
capacity to shift shapes, a central plot device in his massive
operatic project Der Ring der Nibelungen. Sauron’s ring in
Tolkien’s saga and J. K. Rowling’s cloak of invisibility are
modern-day relations.
There are countless magical versions of creatures
moving through the world unseen. The world of angels
and other beings from another dimension occupy if not
our atmosphere then prime real estate in our collective
imaginations. In technological modernity, it’s a cooler,
non-magical understanding of invisibility that compels
us, driving forward a new enthusiasm for seeing what is
unseeable. The emerging science of nanorobotics has its
precedents in techno fantasies like Fantastic Voyage (1966),
114 eye chart
in which a medical team, featuring a tiny Raquel Welch, is
reduced to microscopic scale and injected into a patient’s
system in order to complete a perilous medical procedure.
The animated Magic Schoolbus series features Miss Frizzle,
a redoubtable science teacher who miniaturizes her young
charges and takes them on adventures in learning. Her
school bus may be magic, but the technological dream it
inhabits resonates with research possibilities of nanotech,
robots small enough to enter the system and intervene with
malignant tissue or remove pollutants from a contaminated
liquid. Think about drones and Google Earth scanning our
world with their heightened “opticality,” and think again
about policing the border between the scientific and the
fantastical.
Like the x-ray and the microscope, the eye chart has moved
beyond the doctor’s office to become a means of releasing the
imagination in ways unintended by its inventors.
Eye Terror 115
116
9 Eye Poetry
The Snellen chart is a tool for physicians, and inadvertently for
poets, too. One need only listen, for example, to Billy Collins,
who served a term as poet laureate of the United States from
2001 to 2003. Collins was then and remains today one of the
most popular poets writing in English. His style is unfussy,
even ambitiously unpretentious. Early on, Collins emulated
Wallace Stevens, the mandarin of poetic mandarins, conjurer
of poems that read as Olympian mysteries. Collins writes
poetry that’s nothing like that.
In a recent interview with the Irish Times, Collins laid
down a principle of poem-making, an architectonics of
poetry:
“The beginning of a poem should always be very clear, to
get a reader on board, and only then can you be confident
that when you move into less obvious areas of metaphor or
fantasy that they will go with you. It is like an eye chart, with
its big E at the top, and the letters getting less legible as it
moves along. A poem should be like that.”1
The metaphor is trickier than it sounds. A poem should
be like what, exactly? Collins’s eye chart is a funnel, a moving
target, a shape-shifting object that shunts the reader along
from the real of “its big E at the top” to something less legible.
It’s in the less legible parts of the eye chart that the poet can
get his or her hands dirty with the “less obvious area of
metaphor or fantasy.” So what can’t be read in the Snellen
chart may not be inaccessible. It just may be the place where
metaphor and fantasy are finally liberated from the text.
A lot of texts, poetry included, are eye tests. Anything
with small print—the insurance rider on your car rental, for
example. Things can be eye tests, too. When I was a boy, my
grandmother sometimes asked me to thread a needle for her.
I could hold the sliver of steel up to the light and guide a
colored thread through a lozenge of air. Her needle was an
eye test that I could pass—it was simple enough for a boy of
six—and she couldn’t. For centuries, that lozenge has figured
in our thinking about vision, and other things, too.
The eye of the needle isn’t just small: it’s a trope for
smallness. The needle’s eye can’t be tested; it’s already a test.
In Matthew 19:24 Jesus preaches about the needle test. The
Bishop’s Bible—predecessor to the King James Bible and the
one Shakespeare would have known—translates the passage
this way:
And agayne I say vnto you: it is easier for a camel to go
through the eye of a nedle, then for the riche, to enter into the
kyngdome of God.
This has always seemed pretty simple to me: if you want
to go to heaven, you’d better be poor. If you’re not poor, get
poor. Francis of Assisi showed us that it’s really not difficult
118 eye chart
to do. Maybe an ophthalmological interpretation would
find a different paradox, a different agency here: it would be
easier for a rich guy to thread a camel through a needle’s eye
than to enter heaven. The needle becomes an eye test, which
becomes an obstacle test.
The poetry of the Biblical verses is shaped by the rhythms
of Hebrew and Greek and Early Modern English. The great
seventeenth-century metaphysical poet George Herbert
knew about the shape of metaphor and about the shape
of poems. “Easter Wings,” perhaps his most famous lyric,
represents the forgiving grace of resurrection as a pair of
wings bearing the penitent sinner to paradise. The poem’s
lines are arranged in lines that look like a pair of bird’s wings
in full flight. Lines begin long, shorten, then lengthen again.
This happens twice, once for each wing. Bird wings, divine
beneficence made almost visible to mankind: grace is the
artwork we can never look upon as mortals.
“Easter Wings” is the most distinguished entry in the
category of writing called pattern poems. The shape of the
textual object reflects its subject, and sometimes is its subject.
Form follows and informs content; gesture and meaning
are indivisible. “The Flower,” another of Herbert’s poems,
is about man’s relation to the world, and to God (which
for Herbert is indistinguishable from the world). In “The
Flower,” Herbert plays on the longstanding metaphor of the
world as God’s book—the book of nature—that goes hand in
hand with Scripture, the book of revealed textual truth. Both
are hard to read. Both test us. But, Herbert earnestly hopes,
Eye Poetry 119
Figure 9.1 George Herbert’s “Easter Wings” tests many things,
including eyes.
if we could only make it through those books we would be
ready for God. And to read them we need to be able to read
their symbols. Or, as Herbert puts it, we need to be able to
make out the letters in front of us:
We say amiss
This or that is:
Thy word is all, if we could spell.
Herbert’s world is a spelling bee, a reading comprehension
exam, a cosmic eye chart.
A century after Herbert’s death in 1633, Alexander Pope
observed “’Tis certain, the greatest magnifying glasses in the
120 eye chart
world are a man’s own eyes, when he looks upon his own
person.”2 In the twentieth century, a renewed interest in
typographically self-conscious verse emerged under the label
“concrete poetry.” In the late 1950s and 1960s, there was a
new enthusiasm for poems that flaunted their architectonics,
works that arranged words in shapes and patterns that could
be mimetic of their subject or suggestive of the relation
between subject and the act of writing about that subject. So
a poem like Mary Ellen Solt’s 1966 “Forsythia” is composed
of the letters in the plant’s name, splayed out like the branches
of forsythia, the repeating letters threaded together by dots
and dashes. The whole typographic floral arrangement is
nestled into a rectangular base that, on inspection, turns out
to be composed of the word forsythia, the letters of which
inaugurate nine words: forsythia out race springs yellow
telegram hope insists action.
Of course, every poem ever composed is just as concrete
as any other poem, which is to say that no poem is as
concrete in the same way that concrete is concrete. There’s
an absurdity about calling a poem a concrete thing, but
mainly because that would buy into an idea of concreteness
as being physical, a position against which poetry takes
a stand simply by being poetry. Instead, the typographic
self-consciousness of picture and pattern poems, including
these by Herbert and Solt, insists that by rewriting the formal
rules of linguistic arrangement a poem can lend authenticity
to our experience of the world. So the concreteness of Solt’s
poem emerges from its enthusiasm for language as a material.
Eye Poetry 121
It’s a picture poem as much as Herbert’s “Easter Wings” is a
picture poem, with the added task of transforming forsythia
into an acronym that looks as if it might be a slogan (the
words “hope insists action” feel awkwardly connected, as if it
were a further abbreviation for something).
“Forsythia” is a poem with Dadaist roots. One of
modernism’s founding principles is that founding and
finding can be intimates. From Duchamp’s Fountain to the
poetry created from isolating the words of sportscaster
Phil Rizzuto or the cries of parents at a kid’s soccer match
in Sam Cohen’s recent “Sideline Poetry,”3 found art may be
about many things, but one of those things is going to be
irony.
Is the Snellen chart concrete poetry? (Is the chart even
capable of irony?) Is it a found object? Does it have a position
from which to observe and critique? Can it present a view of
the world marked out with scare quotes?
Probably not, at least in its original form. And yet that
form has been the subject of so much creative work, so much
adaptation to other purposes, it may be easier for you to
think of the Snellen chart as an organizational template for
commentary on—and by means of—typography than as a
diagnostic tool for medical professionals. Snellen invented a
chart but created a meme.
It doesn’t take much imagination to see the Snellen chart’s
autonomous symbols as a concrete poem, not necessarily
readable in the way that normal poems are readable, but
maybe a typographic event, an intervention about the
122 eye chart
possibility of reading poetry, or for that matter reading
anything. That, I think, is why the Snellen chart can be
implicated in modern poetry. Its elements rearrange familiar
lexical markers. It plays with our attention and our capacity
to decipher. It’s difficult, and for that reason it’s brief: nothing
wears out its welcome like a modernist experiment that
doesn’t know when to leave the gallery.
E
In 1865, at almost exactly the same moment at which
Snellen unveiled his table of disappearing letters, the English
mathematician Lewis Carroll published Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland, one of the most sophisticated works ever written
for children. Chapter Three is entitled “A Caucus-Race and a
Long Tale.” You may remember that the animals—and Alice
herself—are drenched, thanks to Alice’s sea of tears, and
need to be dried out. Mouse offers the driest thing he knows,
a history of early English kings, but when it fails to please he
recites “a sad and long tale” involving a cat called Fury and an
unfortunate mouse. Fury proposes they go to court, where
the cat will be judge and jury and condemn the mouse to
death. The “tale” is shaped on the page like a tail, the slender
column of text swerving left and right, the type growing
smaller toward the end of the passage, mimicking the narrow
conclusion of a mouse’s tale and the slim fate of the mouse
itself. The untitled episode, which is sometimes referred to
as “The Tale of the Mouse,” is one of the most familiar visual
disruptions of printed text in English literature, up there with
Eye Poetry 123
the black and marbled pages in Laurence Sterne’s eighteenthcentury proto-modernist novel Tristram Shandy.
For the publisher of any edition of Alice, one creative
decision is the choice of type size: How much smaller should
the tip of the mouse’s tale be than its starting point? With
its vigorous triplets—“Fury said to a mouse, That he met in
the house, ‘Let us both go to law. I will prosecute you’”—the
little poem gobbles up the page’s space. The last word we
hear is “death.” But this isn’t the end of the story. The Mouse
rebukes Alice for not paying attention, and the whole dream
like carnival of the animals withdraws at Alice’s alarming
mention of her cat Dinah. The slender, disappearing text
of the story, though, can hardly have much more to it; the
Mouse-narrator has told us it’s a sad tale, and Fury seems to
hold all the cards. It can’t end well.
The main event of the tale is, in fact, not narrative but
typographic: to read it your eyes have to swerve back and
forth. The reader becomes both the mouse, nervously aware
of imminent danger, as well as the cat watching the mouse’s
every move. The Oxford University Press archive tells us that
“Dodgson considered Macmillan’s original printing crude,
and around 1880 commissioned a new printing plate from
OUP to produce a more elegant image.”4 This is the printing
plate of the reset.
As the millions of readers who treasure the Wonderland
books well know, Carroll’s typographic melodrama is just
one of Alice’s endlessly playful up-endings. Alas (a good
Victorian word), the performing Mouse never gets to tell
124 eye chart
Figure 9.2 Type plate from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
us the rest of the tale of the mouse, a tale that is neither
finished nor finishable. If Alice had paid attention and the
mouse been allowed to continue, the tale could have gone
on, turning again and again, in a series of smaller and smaller
lines. We’ll never know. For the mathematician Charles
Lutwidge Dodgson (if not for his alter ego, the storyteller
Eye Poetry 125
Lewis Carroll), the tale might be representing to us an
asymptote—a line that approaches but never reaches another
line, going on and on into infinity, always closer but never
reaching—and doing it in story terms. We can imagine the
tale, running like a mouse, and the typography that delivers
it to our eyes becoming microscopic, an infinity of twists
and turns, letters measured in Angstrom units, disappearing
off into what theorists don’t call, but might, a narrative
singularity.
It may be no more than coincidence that the Snellen
chart began to appear amid the orderly splendor of the
High Victorian moment, just before Carroll’s disappearing
narrative made its way into print. This little poem isn’t the
only episode in which Carroll plays cat and mouse with his
readers. To borrow the critic Stanley Fish’s classic description
of Milton’s narrative strategy in Paradise Lost, Carroll and
Snellen are authors of two of the best-known examples
of texts that are “self-consuming”: you read them and use
them up (Milton wants to save you, Carroll to entertain you,
Snellen to find out what you can see). We can also read Alice
with Snellen: Carroll’s miniature performance piece is an eye
test for the reader, and a test of a different kind for the poor
mouse in the story.
Alice in Wonderland is a grand if anarchic narrative,
organized with the loopy precision of a dream. Snellen’s
chart resolutely refuses to tell a story, but it organizes its
non-story in an orderly fashion that follows a deliberate
and precise trajectory. It’s hierarchical, but not hierarchical
126 eye chart
like journalism, where the lede delivers the most important
piece of information right at the top (and is spelled that way
so we don’t pronounce it like the metal once used to make
the newspaper’s type). The eye chart is a different kind of
hierarchy, one where the size and consequence are in inverse
proportion, with a sweet spot about three-quarters of the
way down.
It’s more like poetry, where everything is important all the
time but where there’s progress to be made, or maybe to be
won. A poet like Collins reads the eye chart as a model for
making art and bringing it to the public. Is it too much to
claim the Snellen diagram as a work of art itself?
Eye Poetry 127
128
10 Optical
Allusions
In a 2009 issue of Vanity Fair, the critic James Wolcott seized
upon the eye chart to make a point about screen performance.
Bad acting comes in many bags, various odors. It can be
performed by cardboard refugees from an Ed Wood movie,
reciting their dialogue off an eye chart, or by hopped-up
pros looking to punch a hole through the fourth wall from
pure ballistic force of personality, like Joe Pesci in a bad
mood. I can respect bad acting that owns its own style.1
This, to be clear, is Wolcott offering grudging admiration for
genuine bad acting—even acting that seems as if read off an
eye chart (what would that look like? uncomprehending line
readings, haltingly sounded out?). Maybe Snellen’s legacy
should be defended here; television works with cue cards all
the time. At least the eye chart does good work when it’s on
duty. Besides, Ed Wood’s films are in a category all their own.
When it shows up in popular culture in something like its
original form, the eye chart is either in a doctor’s office or being
used as a punch line, a representative piece of ordinariness
that’s meant to lower the tone of its surroundings.
In his memoir Alice, Let’s Eat, Calvin Trillin recounts the
story of a friend who, on a lecture tour to Kansas City, asks
his hosts to take him to Arthur Bryant’s. It’s an establishment,
Trillin reports, that “has been identified as the single greatest
restaurant in the world.” His friend’s hosts refuse. Trillin
diagnoses their embarrassment at the simplicity of the
place, “a barbecue joint whose main dining room has no
decorations beyond an eye chart.”2 The line is nicely set up,
and Trillin’s prose lets you see the undecorated dining room,
with all its energies concentrated on the ritual of barbecue. A
lone, out-of-date girlie calendar—the sort of thing you might
expect at the garage down the street—would have made the
point, but eye chart here is unexpected, and funnier.
Outside of a diagnostic context, an eye chart can be funny, and
other things, too. By the 1940s, the funny papers had taken up
the Snellen diagram and made it a gimmick. There are scores of
cartoons that show people (usually men) placed in an examining
room and asked to identify something on a conspicuously
placed Snellen chart. The joke is either in the chart—there’s a
message spelled out in the Snellen format, there’s a single letter
or symbol repeated over and over, the sizing is wrong—or the
joke is in the caption. In 1942 the Saturday Evening Post ran a
cartoon in which a red-blooded military recruit strains to read
a chart that promises a diagnostic tease, its narrative descending
into smaller and smaller type (“I drew her close to me and soon
her passionate lips . . . ”). In the era before Don’t Ask, Don’t
130 eye chart
Tell, this eye exam was testing for something more than vision
strength. There was a time when manliness was one theme in
eye chart humor, cartoons of vaudevillian simplicity in which
the test is administered by a busty female optometrist. The man
in the chair can’t keep his eyes on the chart.
There are cartoons in which a pirate is taking an eye test.
The chart consists of the letter R, over and over again. The joke
may be too easy. There’s even a variant on the pirate eye-test
cartoon in which the optometrist says, “This is too easy.”
The pirate is as close as humans come to another cartoon
genre: the animal eye exam, evidently administered most
frequently to dogs. The dog eye exam is, as you might expect,
a chart with the words BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK.
(The alternative diagnostic is the WOOF WOOF WOOF
WOOF WOOF chart.) The dog always gets it right. Note to
veterinary optometrists: in the world of cartoons, cats never
seem to get their eyes checked.
There are cartoons that feature trick eye tests, like the
one in which the patient is a goblin, seated in the examining
chair and cheats by stretching its neck to bring it flush with
the chart itself. There are eye charts that pull in references
to other minor monuments of popular culture, like the 1951
sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still. Michael Rennie
played the extraterrestrial Klaatu, who could be recalled
from death by means of the command “Klaatu barada nikto.”
Those three words are the punch line of an eye chart cartoon.
With the now iconic “A long time ago in a galaxy far far
away . . .” the opening sequence of George Lucas’s Star Wars
Optical Allusions 131
made famous the device of text rolling away from the viewer.
Lay those words flat on a poster and they echo the Snellen fade.
At least one cartoonist has picked up that cinematic moment,
though without going as far as renaming it the Lucas eye chart.
There are eye chart cartoons that punish those with
terrible handwriting. A Snellen test for doctors mimics the
illegible scrawls on a prescription pad; the physician-patient
squirms and squints, trying to make sense of the image. As a
punishment, consider it Dante lite.
E
The hypodermic, the thermometer, the x-ray machine, the
stethoscope, and the eye chart: these five tools of modern
medical treatment show up again and again in the simplest
visual narratives. Bring any one of them into the frame and
the reader knows immediately the terms of the situation and
probably how the joke has to work. Among these five, only
the eye chart works with text.
And that’s the key to the eye chart’s pervasive visibility. It’s
all about the text. Today, online retailers will shower you with
all sorts of Snellen-inspired clothing and barware and what
might be described optimistically as ophthalmological objets
d’art. What these products share is a simple graphic allegiance
to the bare-bones elements of the chart’s architecture: rows
of text, reducing in size. There are Snellen gift boxes and
scarves and clocks, Snellen bill caps and pillows and cups.
There are Snellen knee socks with lots of space laying out the
eye chart’s symbols. For the baby there are Snellen onesies
132 eye chart
and a Snellen teddy bear. If you’re in the market for a kid’s
pretend-ophthalmology set (it’s never too early to specialize), a
product line called Little Treasures offers a very pink selection
of medical tools and resources, including a tiny Tumbling E
eye chart. Scaling even further down, there are miniature eye
charts to hang on the wall of a dollhouse. Maybe there are even
smaller eye charts that dollhouse physicians could give to their
dollhouse children to play with, a kind of infinite regress that
seems appropriate given the eye chart’s graphic rules.
There are Snellen bow ties and key rings. There are Snellenthemed pet accessories, including a Snellen T-shirt for your
dog, which has to be a sure-fire conversation starter. You can
even walk Fido while sporting your own eye-chart-themed
belt buckle. When you saunter into your local Starbucks you
might be wearing a Snellen-styled pendant and silver charms
engraved with just enough of the eye chart to let the Snellen
fan at the next table know that you’re one of them.
There are Snellen flip-flops for the vacationer and Snellen
tote bags for the recycler. Snellen scarves and ties, Snellen
wall clocks, Snellen iPhone covers, and Snellen toilet seats
with helpful advice concerning aim and hygiene (all in chart
format). The Restoration Hardware interior furnishings
shop has given the world a set of shot glasses imprinted with
Snellen graphics. Maybe the message is that if you can’t read
the chart on your shot glass somebody else will have to drive
you home.
There is an entire subgenre of “personalized” Snellens—
the chart that takes something important in your life, like
Optical Allusions 133
Figure 10.1 Bottoms up. Shot glasses with diagnostic benefits.
the birth of your child, and lays out name and statistics,
according to the diagram’s rules. There are personalized
Snellens for couples, layered with names and dates and vows.
One needn’t stop at two. There could be personalized Snellens
for the members of your barbershop quartet or synchronized
swimming team. Any of them would fit nicely on the side of a
big coffee mug. There is, in short, a small universe of objects,
relationships, and aspirational lists that have been given the
Snellen treatment or have “Snellenization” still to come. In
the smallest Snellenized objects—ear rings, for instance—we
confront Snellen critical mass: the very least you need are
three lines of type, arranged in descending order of size. Like
134 eye chart
the repetitions in a joke or the questions in a fairy tale, three
is the minimal number to make an eye chart work.
The Snellen format can even dispense with text altogether
and still be recognizable as an eye chart. In these instances,
the familiar layout of optotypes has been entirely replaced
by other non-narrative elements, often a collection of objects
within an identifiably unified class, now arranged in a visual
hierarchy. It isn’t always clear that the object at the top of
the chart is more important than any other—the image is
just set bigger, but the diminished size of subsequent lines
reinforces a familiar association. So there are charts of furniture, for example, where a settee might get the E spot, while
lines of chairs and such descend visually, though not necessarily in any architectural or chronological order. A chart of
animal silhouettes might position a whale as the E creature,
which sounds reasonable enough, with an ocean of creatures
below it, growing ever smaller. There are Snellen charts of
famous buildings and fancy shoes and electric guitars and almost anything else that might be describable in a set of easily
representable, discrete images. Many of these exist in poster
form, their likely destinations a college dorm or a teenager’s
bedroom.
Among other non-linguistic eye charts, one counts
Pi Snellen, which is composed entirely of numbers. The
mathematical constant is an endlessly non-repeating
number, but fortunately Pi Snellen limits itself to the classic
eleven lines. It even marks off the point where the Snellen
chart would indicate 20/20 vision, as if in this case there was
Optical Allusions 135
Figure 10.2 The Pi eye chart.
anything significant in reading off the calculation of pi to the
thirty-sixth place, which falls on line eight.
E
Some of the most interesting Snellen-based graphics use the
heart of the eye chart—the play of letters and the possibility
of language—and take it to the next level. These charts—let’s
call them Message Snellen—have something to say. Like a
bar pour, they can be arranged into two categories: straight
up or on the rocks.
First, Message Snellen straight up. Take, for example,
chart-like compositions that are less about language or
136 eye chart
testing or numbers than simple civic pride. Good-spirited
graphics promote almost every major city and are nicely
printed in white type on black background, suitable for
display anywhere pride or nostalgia may be found. You can
order them from an outfit called Picture It On Canvas, and
for your money you get a city name and key neighborhoods.
They’re spaced out in Snellen formation. Most of the
words break apart as the letters flow to the next line, so that
decoding them is part of the pleasure in recognizing one’s
Figure 10.3 Urban geography as cultural eye test.
Optical Allusions 137
favorite districts. In this example, Uptown gets the last line,
which might suggest that it’s the most exclusive, the least
well known, or the hardest to find.
The straightforward Message Snellen chart is most suitable
for the sincere thought, either polite or enraged, with the
design and text selected to complement one another. When
urging people to support a cause or adjust their perspective
on a social issue, the last thing you want to do is to make
them solve a puzzle. A tea towel in a London shop reads:
Figure 10.4 The most comforting eye chart ever devised.
138 eye chart
“Tea is the finest solution to nearly every catastrophe and
conundrum that the day may bring.”
No funny business. The tea towel’s appeal is to a reader
who wants tea served properly and words spelled completely,
and so the eminently British sentiment is treated with graphic
respect.
Message Snellen can also be educational and compassionate.
A handsome WPA-era poster urging young persons to have
their eyes checked suggests that “John is not really dull—he
may only need to have his eyes examined.”
Figure 10.5 Message Snellen and optical understanding.
Optical Allusions 139
Young John glances uncertainly, past his open book, at
a sheet of paper held by a perhaps exasperated teacher. The
text is laid out in a modified Snellen arrangement.
Message Snellen can be fully evangelical, too. Like the
appeal to understanding for John (who may only need
glasses), the religion-themed Snellen shies away from
clever, broken orthography in favor of the direct embrace.
One example of Evangelical Snellen holds every word intact
within its pyramidal lineation, with the exception of the
very beginning. The text reads: “Jesus will guide you & me /
Worship together / Eternity Devotion Awakening.” The text
becomes exceedingly small, and maybe that’s the point, as if
to say that following the path will lead you to righteousness,
but it will take effort. (See: needle, eye of.)
Figure 10.6 Evangelical Snellen.
140 eye chart
A footnote for the faithful: those word breaks in Snellen
charts aren’t without their perils. For Anglophone readers
who also read French there’s the possibility of a momentary
double-take in those first two lines—je (the first person
singular pronoun) followed by sus, an (admittedly infrequent)
form of the verb savoir (to know), so those first two lines
weirdly enough also mean I knew. (Yes, but did I see?)
The good works of Evangelical Snellen pale, however, before
the frat-boy shenanigans of Drunk Snellen. The eye chart is one
of graphic design’s gifts to intoxication, or maybe it’s the other way
around; Drunk Snellen is Message Snellen’s unattractive neighbor,
and he’s been busy. There are a lot of Drunk Snellen designs,
most premised on the humor in misspelling or scrambling
words, or in finding the bottom of the chart a bunch of letters
that won’t stay still. Nothing says “I can’t drive” or “I don’t think
this is my room” like an eye chart with deliberately blurred text.
Many are crude. Others are just callow in a nerdy way:
Figure 10.7 Drunk Snellen.
Optical Allusions 141
Picture AM I DRUNK OR ARE YOU GETTING
BLURRED? on a T-shirt. The visual punch line falls on the
word blurred—small, fuzzy, and located at waist height or
below, which may not be where you want anybody reading
closely.
The counter to Drunk Snellen may be Romantic Snellen,
which tends to declarations of earnest devotion with a touch
of weep. “I am my beloved and he is my xoxox,” reads one
graphic, also available as a pillow. The kisses are quite small.
Another Romantic Snellen—“Sometimes the heart sees
what is invisible to the eye”—uses the format very well to
make its point. It’s very difficult to see that final “eye.”
For English speakers, the eye/I pun has been romantic
poetry’s ace in the hole at least since Shakespeare’s time.
The Bard’s sonnets have eye/I all over them, and although
Shakespeare lived before the Snellen chart, his verse still
forces us to puzzle out the many ways in which eyes and
I’s—seeing and being and being seen—are intimately
connected.
We are what we see. The modern eye exam negotiates a
space between the clinical formality of a nineteenth-century
medical graphic and the chaos of the body, between the
inorganic abstraction of language and the sometimes all-toopresent reality of the physical forms we occupy. There can’t
be a more direct connection between the eye chart and the
body than a Snellen tattoo.
Tattooing, which writes upon the body, transforms that
inorganic abstraction into art upon the skin. Not all tattoos are
142 eye chart
made of words, but every tattooed word alters our perception
of what writing is and what it’s for. Tattooing changes the
relationship of spoken language—instantly vanishing almost
as it is born—to the body of the tattooee, now holding inked
words in place forever.
Snellen straight up is a challenging goal for a tattoo
artist: so many lines of text, so much precision—vertical and
horizontal spacing, and the special obligation to clarity in the
final line. An East Village arm boasts a Snellen chart, editing
the eleven lines down to nine.
Figure 10.8 Tattoo Snellen.
Optical Allusions 143
If you’re going to get inked and want an eye chart as part
of your display, you might prefer some form of Message
Snellen, maybe a declaration of faith (not quite the same as
Evangelical Snellen—it all depends on who gets to see the
tattoo). When the eye chart meets the Gospel According to
John, the Snellen syntax reformats the Evangelist’s words.
On this photographic subject’s body, a slightly shortened
version of John 9:25 becomes the Gospel according to John
according to Snellen:
ONE THING I KNOW THAT I WAS BLIND NOW I SEE.
Figure 10.9 Inking belief in Snellen terms.
144 eye chart
If faith is a form of second sight, this may be scripture’s most
eloquent test for vision beyond vision.
E
Not long ago, Snellen-style charts were the work of type shop
craftsmanship. Now the internet has made the Snellen format
available to everyone. There’s a free eye-chart generator you
can try for yourself. Following in the digital footsteps of the
internet’s popular anagram generator and the Shakespeare
insult generator, the website eyechartmaker.com allows you
to take Snellen’s format and repurpose it. You get to use
twenty-eight letters (fewer than that and the program fills in
your last line with default letters). So, for example, I was able
to generate this:
Figure 10.10 Do-it-yourself Snellen.
Optical Allusions 145
And this:
Figure 10.11 Do-it-yourself Jaeger.
We can all be children of Snellen now, and we can do that
because the eye chart has been dematerialized, turned into a
way of organizing ideas and delivering them in a package we
can immediately recognize. The Snellen diagram is a shape
that’s been shifted, turned, dramatized, made to amuse and
inspire and even enchant—that’s a lot of work for what began
as an arrangement of nine deliberately non-signifying letters
with one simple-complex diagnostic objective.
146 eye chart
11 The Bottom Line
The eye chart belongs to the world, seriously as a diagnostic
tool, earnestly, and sometimes irreverently, as a graphic
syntax. Visual testing is not only a possibility but also a
right, as visual health is a global issue and one of profound
importance. The Himalayan Cataract Project, to single out
only one aid organization, works to bring sight to—the phrase
is powerfully concise—“the needlessly blind.” You can learn
more about their work at cureblindness.org. Unsurprisingly,
the problem most powerfully affects those with the fewest
resources. In Sudan, Africa’s largest country, medical workers
research the prevalence of “low vision,” a term most often
used to describe limitations to sight that are not correctable
through the usual means of lenses and surgery. Even in
Sudan, the Snellen chart has helped move forward our
knowledge of the problem and its scale.1 The World Health
Organization supports global efforts to identify and combat
threats to vision. In this image, a Landolt eye chart stands on
a Sudanese village wall as a medical professional administers
the exam.
Figure 11.1 Eye testing in a Sudanese village.
Across the world, hospitals have turned the eye chart
into massive public service announcements. In 2012
an enormous banner—seven thousand square feet and
claiming to be the world’s largest eye chart—loomed
over Bannergatta Road, a busy street in Bengaluru, India,
urging people to have their eyes checked. The occasion
was “World Sight Day,” and the project a joint venture
of the Sankara Eye Hospital and the Sankara College
of Optometry. India’s National Programme for the
Prevention of Blindness had declared “Eye test for all” as
the year’s theme.
148 eye chart
Figure 11.2 Snellen as an Indian public service announcement.
The enormous eye chart was in English. I AM YOUR
EYES, it began, taking no chances that the reader need waste
time deciphering the message.
Another ad, created by the Waterworks group for the
Sankara medical program, took a quite different approach: it
arranges elements taken from the “sixty-one languages
currently in use in India”—samples of India’s languages
transformed into optotypes—and lays them out in Snellen
formation. I can’t read the ad, but how many could? There’s
something wonderfully Babel-like about the graphic, which
juxtaposes the linguistic diversity of Indian culture and the
social project of encouraging a widely diverse population to
get eye check-ups.
The Bottom Line 149
In 2015 a giant Tumbling E eye chart was installed on
the side of an eye hospital in Jilin, China. Another hospital
in Zhengzhou City has made the Tumbling E, six stories
high, the wordless face of its windowless side wall. The
Snellen chart has become, through its many descendants,
Figure 11.3 Eye-test posters. Tromsø, Norway.
150 eye chart
a recognizable tool for social change, and it can do that
work on the massive scale of these banners and installations
because its function and message are clear.
The eye chart’s message works at smaller scale, too. Tromsø,
Norway is the world’s most northerly university town. In
wintertime it’s also one of the best places on earth to train
your eyes on the Northern Lights. If you were to stroll down
Tromsø’s main street (which would be hard to avoid) you
might stop in front of a shop window displaying this poster.
“Test synet ditt,” it reads test your eyesight. It’s a Snellen
chart with benefits: the Norwegian text instructs you to stand
three meters back (do it carefully—that would probably
put you in the road) and read the lines of text. Can’t read
the last one? Make an appointment immediately with the
optometrist. Snellen lived before the Department of Motor
Vehicles became a primary site of vision testing, but this
Norwegian chart notates particular lines of text with images
of a car and, further down, a truck. You’ll learn that you need
to have vision this sharp to get a license to drive, and that
sharp if you’re handling a big rig.
Travel three and a half thousand kilometers to the south
to Ljubljana, Slovenia. It won’t take you long to wander
through Stari trg, or the Old Square. At number 21, you will
come upon the Galerija Škuc. Since 1978, the Škuc Gallery
(pronounced “shkoots”) has been a familiar alternative
exhibition space for art and culture, presenting the work of
national and international artists. Škuc stands for Študentski
Kulturni Center, and the acronym points back to the
The Bottom Line 151
organization’s origins. You may mistake the gallery’s sign for
that of an optometrist’s shop.
Galerija Škuc has Snellenized its address. Pay attention
here, it seems to say.
E
Have we come any closer to knowing what kind of a thing
an eye chart is? Something about the eye chart, this inert
piece of graphic design, touches upon not only diagnosis but
also concepts like visual memory, medicine as magic, the
reflection of the self.
Some final definitions:
Eye chart: Part oracular pronouncement, part hieroglyph,
sometimes poem, always picture, the eye chart is the ordinary
object that tells us what we think normal looks like. How many
other ways of getting that reassurance are there? Your vital
signs are within the appropriate range, you live a middle-class
life, are of average intelligence, you dream dreams you hope
are like everyone else’s. But the eye chart promises something
else: the precision of what looks like the right answer. When
I was a student my French professor explained that we would
be graded on a scale of twenty. The best we could get, he
announced, was an 18/20. 19/20 was for le professeur. (Other
systems give 19 to the king, but the professor was no royalist.)
20/20 was for Dieu. Getting 20 out of 20 was divine perfection.
I doubt Herman Snellen had a French lesson in mind.
Eye chart: an object that’s all about lessons—lessons in
reading, lessons in discrimination between shapes, in the
152 eye chart
Figure 11.4 Snellen as graphic style. A gallery sign in Ljubljana.
threshold of diagnosis, in the borders between the machine
and the body and between the organic and the appliance.
Eye chart: an object, a diagnostic tool, a map of crises, an
attitude, a piece of found poetry, a trope of advertising and
politics and humor, a message that finally reaches us only
when, despite our best efforts, it slips out of sight.
Eye chart: A sign in the window we call the world. A test
of our limits.
The Bottom Line 153
Figure 11.5 [Your answer here.]
The British artist Aled Lewis nicely captures the
uncapturable of Snellen’s diagram. It won’t help to enlarge the
image. You’ll have to make do with the eyes you have.
154 eye chart
Acknowledgments
T
he mild obsession that is this little book would never
have happened without the enthusiasm of Chris
Schaberg and Ian Bogost and the editorial guidance
of Haaris Naqvi at Bloomsbury. More than a decade ago, the
short-lived but enthusiastic Group for Early Modern Cultural
Studies heard my first attempts—barely a handful of pages—
at bridging Daza, Snellen, and cultural studies, after which
that material was put into the deep freeze of my hard drive.
The opportunity to revive and expand a sketch into a book
reminds me of how much fun it is to work on subjects that—
to keep with my theme—often lie outside the visual field. I
am especially grateful to the National Library of Medicine
in Bethesda, which made rare materials available, and to the
New York Academy of Medicine Library and its librarian,
Arlene Shaner. Other institutions were generous with access,
materials, and time: the Grolier Club, NYU’s Bobst Library, the
Cooper Union Library, and the National Gallery, Washington.
The World Health Organization and Oxford University
Press supplied photographs. Two generous friends—Hal
Sedgwick, professor at the SUNY School of Optometry, and
my Cooper Union colleague Alexander Tochilovsky, curator
of the Lubalin Center for Typography—were kind enough to
read the manuscript. Some years ago, Mario Biagioli pointed
me toward the history of Italian telescopy. Julie Park pointed
me to eighteenth-century materials. Raffaele Bedarida and
Jacques Lezra spot-checked spots. Any lapses in the final text
remain, however, my own responsibility. My thanks to Ina
Saltz and Aled Lewis for the use of their work, Ben Ross Davis
for allowing me to photograph his arm, and to Dr. Paul Runge,
who shared with me his deep technical knowledge and, in so
doing, reminds us that ephemera is sometimes the name other
people use for the fragile things, such as eye charts, that turn
out to be really interesting after all.
156 Acknowledgments
Notes
Chapter 1
1 U.S. Medical Investigator 21 (1885): 301–6.
2 Oxford English Dictionary online, entry “eye,” accessed May 31,
2016.
3 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography,
trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang,1982), 8.
[Orig.1980 as La chambre claire].
Chapter 2
1 See the British Museum online collection site, http://www.
britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_
object_details.aspx?objectId=369215&partId=1, accessed May
31, 2016.
2 Aristophanes: Three Comedies, trans. William Arrowsmith
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977), 59–60, ©
William Arrowsmith 1961.
3 See Lawrence Weschler, Mr Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder:
Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other
Wonders of Jurassic Technology. Vintage: New York, 1996.
4 http://www.college-optometrists.org/en/college/museyeum/
online_exhibitions/spectacles/invention.cfm, accessed August
14, 2016.
5 http://www.college-optometrists.org/en/college/museyeum/
online_exhibitions/spectacles/invention.cfm, accessed May 28,
2016.
6 D. Graham Burnett, Descartes and the Hyperbolic Quest: Lens
Making Machines and Their Significance in the Seventeenth
Century, American Philosophical Society 95, part 3
(Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2005), 9.
7 Vincent Illardi, Renaissance Vision from Spectacles to Telescopes
(Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2007), 150.
Chapter 3
1 Benito Daza de Valdés, Uso de los antojos para todo genero de
vistas (Seville, 1623).
2 Instituto de Óptica “Daza de Valdés” (at C/Serrano 121,
Madrid) falls under the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones
Científicas. The Instituto de Óptica was established in 1946.
http://www.io.csic.es/IO_en/Presentation.htm.
3 Edward Rosen, “The Invention of Eyeglasses,” Journal of the
History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 1956 (XI: 1): 13–46.
4 Paul E. Runge, MD, “Eduard Jaeger’s Test-Types (Schrift-
Scalen) and the Historical Development of Vision Tests,”
158 Notes
Transactions of the American Ophthalmological Society 98
(2000): 375–438.
5 August Colenbrander, MD, “The Historical Evolution of Visual
Acuity Measurement,” ResearchGate, 2009, https://www.
researchgate.net/publication/232081008_The_Historical_
Evolution_of_Visual_Acuity_Measurement, accessed May 31,
2016.
6 Daza, Uso de los antojos, Dialogue 1, 33.
Chapter 4
1 Maria Luisa Righini Bonelli and Albert Van Helden, Divini
and Campani: A Forgotten Chapter in the History of the
Accademia del Cimento (Florence: Istituto e Museo di Storia
della Scienza di Firenze, 1981), 31, 50.
2 Ibid., 21.
3 Ibid., 32.
4 Ibid., 34.
5 George Adams, Essay on Vision (London, 1792), 98.
6 Runge, (386) points out that this is the only printing of
Küchler’s chart.
7 Runge (388), quoting Küchler’s original preface to his
Schriftnummerprobe (1843).
8 Michel Meulders, Helmholtz: From Enlightenment to
Neuroscience, trans. Laurence Garey (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2012), 105.
9 http://www.college-optometrists.org/en/college/museyeum/
online_exhibitions/optical_instruments/charts.cfm.
Notes 159
10 See, for example, Test Chart 2000 (“the first Windows-
based computerized test chart in the world”) and its current
iteration, Test Chart 2016, from Thomson Software Solutions:
http://www.thomson-software-solutions.com/test-chart-xpert3di/.
Chapter 5
1 Edmond Landolt, A Manual of Examination of the Eyes, trans.
Swan M. Burnett (London, 1879), 17.
2 Sir Thomas Longmore, The Illustrated Optical Manual
(London: Longmans, Greene & Co, 1888), 186.
3 C. Devereux Marshall, F.R.C.S., Diseases of the Eyes (New
York: William Wood & Company, 1914), 294ff.
4 https://nei.nih.gov/health/color_blindness/facts_about
accessed May 6, 2017.
5 An early Snellen stumble: though quickly setting on the letter
E, a previous Snellen chart gave pride of place to the letter A.
The Istituto Nazionale di Ottica in Florence has an example
from 1862. See: Bonelli and Van Helden, 37.
6 Allan Metcalf, “My 20/20 Prediction,” Chronicle of Higher
Education, September 2, 2016 http://www.chronicle.com/
blogs/linguafranca/author/ametcalf/.
7 Merriam-Webster Dictionary online, accessed August 9, 2016.
8 August Colenbrander, Duane’s Ophthalmology, ch. 51.
9 Michael F. Marmor, MD, “An Eye Chart for Edgar Degas,”
JAMA Ophthalmology, 131:10 (October 2010): 1353–55,
accessed online June 8, 2016.
160 Notes
10 Ibid.
11 See Ian Bailey, “New Design Principles for Visual Acuity Letter
Charts,” American Journal of Optometry and Physiological
Optics 53, I11 (November 1976): 740–45.
12 See Jan E. Lovie-Kitchin, “Is It Time to Confine Snellen Charts
to the Annals of History?,” Ophthalmic and Physiological
Optics, 35 (2015), 631–36.
13 George Mayerle, test chart, Schmidt Litho Co, San Francisco,
1907. Courtesy U.S. National Library of Medicine digital
collections.
Chapter 6
1 Runge, “Eduard Jaeger’s Test-Types,” 392.
2 William F. Norris, MD and Charles A. Oliver, MD,
System of Diseases of the Eye 2 (Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott,
1900), 28.
3 “Few of the many series of reading test-types published from
time to time will compare with the ‘Schrift-scalen’ of Jaeger,
published in 1854, for fullness and even grading, and which,
from Nos. 1 and 9, practically give a paragraph of reading for
each visual angle of one minute from 4’ to 12’, as measured
by the short, lower-case letters.” Transactions of the Section on
Ophthalmology of the American Medical Association, 1910, 145.
4 Test-Types . . . corresponding to the Schrift-Scalen of Eduard
Jaeger (New York: William Wood & Co., 1868).
5 See Le site de la société d’études töpfériennes at www.topfer.ch.
6 Examples taken from the fifth edition of the Optotypi,
Notes 161
published in 1875 simultaneously in London, Berlin, New
York, and Utrecht. A test-type booklet despite its title, the
publication bears Snellen’s name on the title page.
Chapter 7
1 D. Hack Tuke, MD, ed., A Dictionary of Psychological Medicine
(London: J. A. Churchill, 1892), 290.
2 Ibid.
3 Irving B. Weiner and Roger L Greene, Handbook of Personality
Assessment (New York: John Wiley, 2008), 347.
Chapter 8
1 William Germano, The Tales of Hoffmann (BFI Film Classics),
2013.
2 H. G. Wells, The Invisible Man: A Grotesque Romance (New
York: Dover, 1992), 108.
3 Marcel Proust, “Du côté de Chez Swann,” A la recherche du
temps perdu (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), 54. Translation mine.
Chapter 9
1 “When I start a poem, I assume the indifference of readers,”
Irish Times, August 11, 2014.
162 Notes
2 Alexander Pope, The Works of Alexander Pope, vol. 3 (London,
1778), 297.
3 Phil Rizzuto, O Holy Cow! The Selected Verse of Phil Rizzuto
(New York: Harper, 2008); Sam Cohen, The New Yorker, May
29, 2015.
4 http://blog.oup.com/2015/07/alice-wonderland-slideshow/
Mouse tail “stereotype plate” from Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland, a second issue of the first edition of “Alice”
photographed by Jack Campbell-Smith for Oxford University
Press. Reproduced here by permission.
Chapter 10
1 James Wolcott, “I’m a Culture Critic & Hellip; Get Me Out of
Here!” Vanity Fair, December 2009.
2 Calvin Trillin, Alice, Let’s Eat: Further Adventures of a Happy
Eater (New York: Random House, 2007), 32.
Chapter 11
1 Jeremiah Ngondi et al., “Prevalence and Causes of Blindness
and Low Vision in Southern Sudan,” PLoS Med, December
2006; 3 (12): e477. Published online December 19, 2006, doi:
10.1371/journal.pmed.0030477, accessed August 22, 2016.
Notes 163
164
Index
Note: Page references for illustrations appear in italics.
20/20 (TV news
magazine) 59
20/20 ratio (Snellen
fraction) 59–62
accademia 41
Accademia dei Lincei 41–2
Accademia del Cimento 42–4
Adams, George 48
Essay on Vision 48
Age of Discovery 20
Alice, Let’s Eat (Trillin) 130
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
(Carroll) 123–6, 125
American Civil War 87
annuit coeptis 29
anteojos 26
antojos 26, 39
Aristophanes 14–15, 37
The Clouds 15
Arthur Bryant’s
(restaurant) 130
Assyria 14, 16
astronomy 13–14, 21, 22, 29
As You Like It
(Shakespeare) 27
Athens, Greece 14–16
Australia 72
Austria 5, 31
Babylonia 61–2
Backus, Jim 100
Bacon, Francis 29, 30
Sylva Sylvarum, or a
Natural History in Ten
Centuries 29, 30
Bacon, Roger 18
Bailey-Lovie chart. See logMAR
chart
Barthes, Roland 7
Camera Lucida 7
Beethoven, Ludwig van 17
Bengaluru, India 148
Berenson, Bernard 95–6
Bethesda, Maryland 25
Bible 96, 118–19, 144, 144
Borneo 20
Braque, Georges 50
Britain 138, 138–9
Army 56–8
Department of
Forestry 57
Indian Pilot Service 57
Royal Irish
Constabulary 57
Royal Navy 57
British Museum 14, 67
Burnett, D. Graham 20
Busustow, Stephen 100
Calvino, Italo 86–7
If on a Winter’s Night a
Traveller 86–7
Camera Lucida (Barthes) 7
Campani, Giuseppe 42–4, 51
Carroll, Lewis 123–6, 125
Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland 123–6,
125
Cassatt, Mary 69, 70
Champollion, JeanFrançois 66–7
Christianity 1, 16, 31
Cicero 46
De finibus bonorum et
malorum 46
Cincinnati, Ohio 1–2
166 Index
Clouds, The
(Aristophanes) 15
Cohen, Sam 122
“Sideline Poetry” 122
Collins, Billy 117–18, 127
“Colour-Ignorance Test” 57
Comedy of Errors, The
(Shakespeare) 37
Commedia (Dante) 43
connoisseurship 95–6
contact lens. See lens/
lenscrafting
contes d’Hoffmann, Les
(Offenbach) 105
Conversations with
Eckermann (Goethe
interviews) 79–80
Coppélia (ballet) 105
Córdoba, Spain 25
Corman, Roger 110–12
X: The Man with the X-Ray
Eyes 110–12
Cowper, William 35
“The Solitude of Alexander
Selkirk” 35
criminology 91–5
Culver City, California 18
Dada 50, 122
Dante 43, 132
Commedia 43
Day the Earth Stood Still, The
(Wise) 131
Daza de Valdés, Benito 25–39,
28, 32, 46, 48, 99
Uso de los antojos para todo
genero de vistas 25–39,
28, 32, 99
De finibus bonorum et malorum
(Cicero) 46
Defoe, Daniel 35
Robinson Crusoe 35
Degas, Edgar 69, 70–2, 71
Scene from the Steeplechase:
The Fallen Jockey 70–2,
71
Delibes, Léo 105
Department of Motor
Vehicles 151
Dick and Jane series 51
Dickens, Charles 80–1, 99
Sketches by Boz 81
Dictionary of Psychological
Medicine 93
digital humanities 85
diopter 63–4
divine light 28, 29, 30
Divini, Eustachio 42–4, 51
Dodgson, Charles Lutwidge.
See Carroll, Lewis
do-it-yourself Jaeger 146
do-it-yourself Snellen 145,
145
Donders, Franciscus 5, 52, 55
dream interpretation 96–7,
106
Drunk Snellen 141, 141–2
Duchamp, Marcel 50, 122
Fountain 122
Du côté de chez Swann
(Proust) 113–14
Early Modern world 37–9, 41
“Easter Wings”
(Herbert) 119, 120,
122
EDTRS (Early Treatment
Diabetic Retinopathy
Study) chart 74
Edwardian era 57
Egypt 14
Egyptian style 65–6
Egyptomania 66
El Greco 70
Eliot, T. S. 84
England 38, 42, 46–7, 47, 56
Royal Society 42
Essay on Vision (Adams) 48
Europe 20, 41, 50, 58, 66, 78
eyechartmaker.com 145, 145,
146
eye/eyesight 18
20/20 ratio 59–62
aging 20, 25, 27, 31, 103
and art 69–72, 71, 95–6
artificial eye 103–5
astigmatism 9–10, 63, 92
blindness 10, 34, 103–4,
106, 147, 148
Index 167
blur 64, 65
cataract 69, 72,
99, 147
color blindness 57–8
correction 62–4
criminology 93–5
farsightedness 9, 37, 63
floater 10
focus 64
gender 31, 58
and health 74
lens 99
light pollution 13
looking and seeing 18,
21–2, 27
macular degeneration 10
nearsightedness 9, 20, 33,
63, 99–101, 100
optic nerve 53
peripheral vision 10
presbyopia 9
pressure 10
pseudo-isochromatism 58
reading 18–19, 34–5,
43–4, 48–51, 56, 77–89,
79, 80, 83, 117–23, 120,
124–7, 152
retina 10, 21, 53,
74, 99
sharpness 91–6, 152
social impact 35–9
and the soul 46–7, 47
strength 48, 63, 92
168 Index
technology 17–18, 21–2,
27–9, 33–6, 39, 41–4,
47–54, 49, 50, 55–64
terror 103–10, 107
vision theory 27–9
visual field 10, 61–3
eyeglasses 3, 13, 18, 19–21,
26–27, 28, 33–6, 38,
39, 41, 47, 48, 57, 62–4,
91, 99
Fantastic Voyage
(Fleischer) 114–15
Fish, Stanley 126
Fleischer, Richard
Fantastic Voyage 114–15
Florence, Italy 42–3
“Flower, The”
(Herbert) 119–20
“Flowers for Algernon”
(Keyes) 98
Folger Shakespeare
Library 25
“Forsythia”
(Solt) 121–2
Foucault, Michel 95
Fountain (Duchamp) 122
Francis of Assisi 118–19
Freud, Sigmund 65, 96–7,
104, 106
The Interpretation of
Dreams 96–7, 106
“The Uncanny” 104
Galerija Škuc 151–2, 153
Galileo 21–2, 39, 41, 42
Sidereus Nuncius 21
Germany 31, 49–52, 74,
79–80, 87
Gilded Age 95
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang
von 79, 79–81
Conversations with
Eckermann
(interviews) 79–80
Google Earth 115
graphic design 3, 6–7, 9, 11, 32,
32, 33, 44, 52, 53, 55–61,
64–5, 68–9, 69, 73, 73–5,
75, 82–3, 83, 132–46, 134,
136, 137, 138, 139, 140,
141, 143, 144, 145, 146,
147, 152, 153
Great Seal of the United
States 29
Gutenberg, Johannes 82
Herbert, George 119–22
“Easter Wings” 119, 120,
122
“The Flower” 119–20
hieroglyph 66–7, 152
Himalayan Cataract
Project 147
Histoire de M. Vieux Bois
(Toepffer) 87
Hitchcock, Alfred 104
Vertigo 104
Höch, Hannah 50
Hoffmann, E. T. A. 103–5
The Nutcracker 103
“The Sandman” 103–5
Homeopathic Medical Society
of Ohio 1–2
Hooke, Robert 39
House Beautiful 19
hyperopia. See eye/eyesight;
farsightedness
hypodermic 132
Hammurabi 62
Harry Potter series
(Rowling) 114
heimlich/unheimlich 104
Heine, Heinrich 87
Helmholtz, Hermann
von 52–3
Henry V (Shakespeare) 27
Henry VI Part 2
(Shakespeare) 27
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller
(Calvino) 86–7
illuminated manuscript 17, 18
Impressionism 69–70
India 149
National Programme
for the Prevention of
Blindness 148–9, 149
Interpretation of Dreams, The
(Freud) 96–7, 106
Index 169
invisibility 110–15
Invisible Man, The
(Wells) 106–8
Invisible Man, The
(Whale) 107, 107
Irish Times 117
Ishihara, Shinobu 58
Italian Renaissance 95
Italy 18, 20–2, 41–4,
51, 80, 87
Jaeger, Eduard 5–7, 65,
77–83, 79, 80, 83,
85–6, 88
reading card and testtype 5–7, 77–83, 79,
80, 83, 85–9, 146
Japan 57–8
Jilin, China 150
Johns Hopkins University
Low Vision Institute 73
Judaism 13
Kafka, Franz 103
Kansas City, Missouri 130
Keaton, Buster 99
Kepler, Johannes 21
Keyes, Daniel 98
“Flowers for Algernon” 98
Kircher, Athanasius 66
klecksography 97–8
Küchler, Heinrich 49, 49–52,
50, 55
170 Index
Laennec, René 53
Landolt, Edmond 68–70, 69
Landolt C chart 68–9,
69, 147
Latin language 44–5, 87
Leeuwenhoek, Antonie
van 22
LensCrafters 16–17
lens/lenscrafting 14–17,
19–20, 22, 25, 27–37, 39,
41–4, 47–8, 55, 92
Lewis, Aled 154
Lisbon, Portugal 26
literacy 8, 16, 20–1
Lithuania 95
Little Treasures 133
Ljubljana, Slovenia 151–2,
153
L.L. Bean 32
logMAR chart 72–3,
73, 74
Lombroso, Cesare 92–6
L’uomo delinquente 92–5
London, England 67
London College of
Optometrists 18
Lord of the Rings, The
(Tolkien) 114
lorem ipsum 45–6
Lucas, George 131–2
Star Wars 131–2
L’uomo delinquente
(Lombroso) 92–5
McClintock, Richard 46
Madrid, Spain 25, 26
Magellan, Ferdinand 20
Magic Schoolbus (series) 115
magnification 13–16, 18,
26, 39
Marmor, Michael 70–2
Masonic eye 29
Mayerle, George 74
Mayerle eye chart 74, 75
Metternich, Klemens von 77
Metz, Christian 114
Meulders, Michel 53
microscope 18, 22, 39, 42, 115
mie prigioni, Le (Pellico) 87
Milland, Ray 110, 111
Milton, John 21–2, 126
Paradise Lost 22, 126
miniature/micro
miniature 17, 18
modernism 13, 17, 39, 50, 65,
114, 122, 123
Monet, Claude 69, 70
Morelli, Giovanni 95
Morgenthal Frederics 34
Motley, John Lothrop 88
Mr. Magoo 99–101, 100, 110
Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol
(TV special) 99
Museum of Jurassic
Technology 18
myopia. See eye/eyesight;
nearsightedness
nanorobotics 114–15
National Gallery of Art,
Washington, DC 70
National Library of
Medicine 25
National Vision Research
Institute of
Australia 72
logMAR chart 72–4, 73
Nederlandsch Gasthuis voor
Ooglijders 5
Netherlands 2, 5, 31, 41, 87,
88
New Orleans, Louisiana 1,
137
Newton, Isaac 39, 41
New York Academy of
Medicine Library 78
New York City 34, 81
New Yorker 122
Nimrud Lens 14
Norway 14, 151
Nuremberg Chronicle
(Schedel) 20
Nutcracker, The
(Hoffmann) 103
Offenbach, Jacques 105
Les contes d’Hoffmann 105
Old Masters 19, 95
ophthalmology 4–6, 24–5,
39, 52, 55–64, 69, 70, 99,
119, 132
Index 171
ophthalmoscope 52–3
opkomst en bloei der Vereenigde
Nederlanden, De
(Styl) 87
optician 6, 16, 34, 42, 48
optometer 23–4, 24
optometry 6, 17, 21, 25, 34,
47–8, 53, 110, 131, 151
optotype 65–6, 78, 135, 149
Orientalism 66
Oscar award 100
Oulipo group 86
Oxford English Dictionary 2, 7
Oxford University Press 124
Paradise Lost (Milton) 22,
126
Parker, Dorothy 60
Paul, Jean 79
Pellico, Silvio 87
Le mie prigioni 87
Perec, Georges 86
A Void 86
Petrarch 43
Philip IV, King of Spain 38
photography 7, 99
Picasso, Pablo 50
Picture It On Canvas 137
Plato 37, 114
Symposium 37
Plautus 37
poetry 22, 43–4, 117–23, 120,
127, 153
172 Index
Pope, Alexander 120–1
Powell, Michael 105–6
The Tales of
Hoffmann 105–6
Pressburger, Emeric 105–6
The Tales of
Hoffmann 105–6
Proust, Marcel 113–14
A la recherche du temps
perdu 113
Du côté de chez
Swann 113–14
Psychodiagnostik
(Rorschach) 97
psychological testing 96–9
publishing 44–6
lorem ipsum 45–6
Pulte Medical College,
Cincinnati 1
Rains, Claude 107, 107
reading 7, 20, 77–89, 79, 80,
83, 117–27, 120, 152
reading card 5–6, 7, 77–83,
79, 80, 83, 85–6
reading stone 14, 17, 18, 27
recherche du temps perdu, A la
(Proust) 113
Reformation 20
Renaissance 18–19
Rennie, Michael 131
Restoration Hardware 133, 134
Richards, I. A. 84
Rickles, Don 111
Ring der Nibelungen, Der
(Wagner) 114
Risorgimento 87
Rizzuto, Phil 122
Robert Marc 34
Robinson Crusoe (Defoe) 35
Rome, Italy 14, 16, 26, 42–3
Röntgen, William 106, 108
Rorschach, Hermann 97–8
Psychodiagnostik 97
Rorschach test 97–9
Rorschach: The Inkblot Party
Game 98
Rosetta Stone 66–7
Rowling, J. K. 114
Harry Potter series 114
Saint Ambrose; Saint
Jerome 19
“Sandman, The”
(Hoffmann) 103–5
San Francisco, California 74
Sankara College of Optometry,
India 148
Sankara Eye Hospital,
India 148
Saturday Evening Post 130
Scene from the Steeplechase:
The Fallen Jockey
(Degas) 70–2, 71
Schedel, Hartmann 20
Nuremberg Chronicle 20
Schiller, Friedrich 79, 80,
80, 81
Schrift-scalen. See test-type
Scientific Revolution 29
screen performance 129,
131–2
self-regulating individual 39
Seneca 16
Seville, Spain 25, 26
Shakespeare, William 17, 25,
27, 37, 118, 142
As You Like It 27
The Comedy of Errors 37
Henry V 27
Henry VI Part 2 27
The Winter’s Tale 27
Sharper Image 91
Shearer, Moira 105
“Sideline Poetry”
(Cohen) 122
Sidereus Nuncius (Galileo) 21
Silverman, Kaja 9
Simon, Neil 37
Sketches by Boz (Dickens) 81
Sloan, Louise 73
Sloan (typeface) 73
Snellen, Herman 2, 4–6, 7,
11, 11, 32, 44, 52, 55–61,
64–9, 81–2, 85, 129, 152
Egyptian Paragon 65–6, 67
Snellen chart 2–5, 7–11,
11, 20, 32, 41, 44, 48, 50,
52–61, 64–8, 72, 73, 75,
Index 173
83, 85–6, 91–2, 93–5, 99,
109, 111, 117–18, 122–3,
126–7, 129–30, 129–46,
134, 136, 137, 138, 139,
140, 141, 143, 144, 145,
147–54, 148, 149, 150,
153, 154
Snellen fraction (20/20
ratio) 59–62
Snellenization 132–5
Snellen meme
Drunk Snellen 141, 141–2
Evangelical Snellen 140,
140–1, 144, 144–5
Message Snellen 136–46,
137, 138, 139, 140, 141,
143, 144, 145, 146, 154
Pi Snellen 135–6, 136
Romantic Snellen 142
Tattoo Snellen 142–4, 143,
144
Sokrates 15
“Solitude of Alexander Selkirk,
The” (Cowper) 35
Solt, Mary Ellen 121
“Forsythia” 121–2
Sorbonne, Paris 68
Spain 31, 33–4, 38
Spanish Inquisition 25
spectacles. See eyeglasses
Spicy Mystery Stories (pulp
series) 112
Starbucks 133
174 Index
Star Wars (Lucas) 131–2
Sterne, Laurence 124
Tristram Shandy 124
stethoscope 53, 132
Stevens, Wallace 117
Strepsiades 15
Styl, Simon 87
De opkomst en bloei
der Vereenigde
Nederlanden 87
Sudan, Africa 147, 148
Superman 109, 109–12
Sylva Sylvarum, or a Natural
History in Ten Centuries
(Bacon) 29, 30
Symposium (Plato) 37
Tacitus 87
Tales of Hoffmann, The (Powell,
Pressburger) 105–6
telescope 8, 21, 22,
39, 41–4
test-type 77–83, 79, 80, 83,
85–9
thermometer 132
Toepffer, Rodolphe 87
Histoire de M. Vieux
Bois 87
Tokyo, Japan 34, 58
Tolkien, J. R. R. 114
The Lord of the Rings 114
Tommaso da Modena 18
Treviso, Italy 18
Trillin, Calvin 130
Alice, Let’s Eat 130
Tristram Shandy (Sterne) 124
Tromsø, Norway 150, 151
Tudor dynasty 38
Tumbling E Chart 68
typography 11, 44–6, 49, 50,
64–75, 67, 69, 73, 75,
77–83, 79, 80, 83, 121–7,
125, 145
Egyptian Paragon 65–6,
67
Fraktur 49, 50, 50, 74, 75
Landolt C 68–9, 69
“Uncanny, The” (Freud) 104
United States
National Institutes of
Health 58
poet laureate 117
WPA 139, 139–40
UPA (animation group) 99.
See also Mr. Magoo
Uso de los antojos para todo
genero de vistas (Daza
de Valdés) 25–39, 28,
32, 99
Utrecht, Netherlands 2, 4–5, 55
Vanity Fair 129
Varner, Helen 1–2
Venice, Italy 25
Vertigo (Hitchcock) 104
Victorian era 56, 126
Vienna, Austria 78, 96, 97
vision. See eye/eyesight
vision statement 59
visual categorization 91–6
visual testing
as cartoon 130–2
eugenics 92–5
global health and social
change 147–52, 148,
149, 150
graphic design 3, 6–7, 9,
11, 32, 32, 33, 44, 52, 53,
55–61, 64–5, 68–9, 69,
73, 73–5, 75, 82–3, 83,
132–46, 134, 136, 137,
138, 139, 140, 141, 143,
144, 145, 146, 147, 152,
153
history 27–37, 38, 48–64,
49, 50, 68–9, 74–5, 87–9,
92–8, 106
literacy 56
logarithm 72
magnification 64
mathematics 60–2
measurement 4, 8, 10,
13–14, 22, 38, 55, 63, 91–2
memory and
repetition 51–3, 55
merchandising 132–5,
134, 153
military objective 56–7
Index 175
object as 118–19
photography 92–5
popular culture 131–5,
134, 142–6, 143, 144
prescription 62–4
reading card 5–7, 77–83,
79, 80, 83, 85–6
Snellen chart 2–11, 11,
20, 32, 41, 44, 48, 50, 52,
53–61, 64–7, 68, 72, 73,
75, 83, 85–6, 91–2, 93–5,
99, 109, 111, 117–18,
122–3, 126–7, 129–30,
147–54, 148, 149, 150,
153, 154
standardization 5–7, 55
technology 8, 11, 15,
16–17, 23, 24, 31–2, 34,
39, 48–64, 49, 50, 70–5,
73, 75, 77–86, 79, 80, 83,
112–13
test-type 77–83, 79, 80,
83, 85–9
text as 117–23, 120, 125,
126–7, 132
tonometry 10
visual field test 10, 61–2
x-ray 113–14
Void, A (Perec) 86
Wagner, Richard 17, 114
Der Ring der
Nibelungen 114
176 Index
Walt Disney Company 99
Watchmen (graphic novel
series) 98
Waterworks 149
Welch, Raquel 115
Wells, H. G. 106–8
The Invisible
Man 106–8
Whale, James
The Invisible Man
(film) 107, 107
Wieland, Christoph
Martin 79
Winter’s Tale, The
(Shakespeare) 27
Wise, Robert
The Day the Earth Stood
Still 131
Wolcott, James 129
Wood, Ed 129
World Health
Organization 147
World Sight
Day 148
World War I 57–8
World War II 109
X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes
(Corman) 110–12
x-ray 106, 108–15, 132
Zhengzhou City,
China 150