# How did people handle blurry vision prior to corrective lenses? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [October 27, 2011, 2:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-people-handle-blurry-vision-prior-to-corrective-lenses/600934 "2011-10-27T02:26:42Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2011, 8:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-people-handle-blurry-vision-prior-to-corrective-lenses/600934/21 "2011-10-27T08:53:16Z")
People who were blind or virtually so had seeing-eye people, either family or servants. The Spanish name for a blind person’s guide is _lazarillo_, derived from the 16th-century novel _El Lazarillo de Tormes_, whose eponymous protagonist is such a guide for a beggar/yellow-press bard/all-around rogue. Keep in mind that “blurry vision afar” and “blurry vision close up” have very different consequences in daily life: if you were myopic (blurry afar) you’d be shit at shooting a bow or watching for pirates/invading armies but it wouldn’t hurt your sewing, painting or writing at all. Conversely, if you had hypermetropy (blurry close up), it wouldn’t affect your shooting but you’d never become an illustrator. People with relatively-bad but not awfully-bad sight would go into trades or split tasks in the way that made most sense. ---
**Author:** ![Quintas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/48db29/32.png) [@Quintas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quintas)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2011, 9:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-people-handle-blurry-vision-prior-to-corrective-lenses/600934/22 "2011-10-27T09:14:57Z")
> [@Measure\_for\_Measure](#): > > Qualification: Life expectancy was lower among adults as well, though yes infant mortality drove much of reduction in life expectancy at birth. > > [Life expectancy - Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy) > > During the Upper Paleolithic age, life expectancy at age 15 was… 54. (33 at birth). In Ancient Rome, life expectancy at 15 was… 52 (28 at birth). True. My pet peeve is the idea that because life expectancy was lower, people must have suffered from geriatric issues at a younger age than now. In ancient Rome, I wonder how much of the lowered life expectancy at age 15 (adults) was due to warfare? Also what is the definition of ‘ancient Rome’? ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2011, 9:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-people-handle-blurry-vision-prior-to-corrective-lenses/600934/23 "2011-10-27T09:17:40Z")
> [@Quintas](#): > > In ancient Rome, I wonder how much of the lowered life expectancy at age 15 was due to warfare? Or to cancer, stomach ulcers, gout, tuberculosis… ---
**Author:** ![Quintas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/48db29/32.png) [@Quintas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quintas)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2011, 9:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-people-handle-blurry-vision-prior-to-corrective-lenses/600934/24 "2011-10-27T09:26:40Z")
> [@Nava](#): > > Or to cancer, stomach ulcers, gout, tuberculosis… Cancer, im not sure. Whats the average age a person with no medical care dies of cancer in modern times? Probably similar back then. I’m guessing the big factor in lowering life expectancy upon reaching adulthood was war. But then its a matter of defining ‘ancient Rome’. Are you talking about a person in the 1st century or a person during the punic wars? ---
**Author:** ![UDS](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ecae2f/32.png) [@UDS](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UDS)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2011, 10:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-people-handle-blurry-vision-prior-to-corrective-lenses/600934/25 "2011-10-27T10:03:46Z")
> [@Quintas](#): > > Cancer, im not sure. Whats the average age a person with no medical care dies of cancer in modern times? Probably similar back then. > > I’m guessing the big factor in lowering life expectancy upon reaching adulthood was war. But then its a matter of defining ‘ancient Rome’. Are you talking about a person in the 1st century or a person during the punic wars? Actually, the big factor lowering life exectancy on reaching adulthood was pregnancy and childbirth, though of course that only affected half the population. War lowered life expectancy for men, but not to the same extent. Both sexes died in agricultural accidents. ---
**Author:** ![Toxylon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/f05b48/32.png) [@Toxylon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Toxylon)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2011, 10:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-people-handle-blurry-vision-prior-to-corrective-lenses/600934/26 "2011-10-27T10:08:13Z")
> [@Measure\_for\_Measure](#): > > Indigenous populations tend to have lower incidence of myopia. As they become more integrated into modern society, their myopia increases: > > Trans Am Ophthalmol Soc. 2003; 101: 107–112. “A myopic shift in Australian Aboriginals: 1977-2000” by Hugh R Taylor, T A Robin, V C Lansingh, L M Weih, and J E Keeffe The same phenomena has been recorded among the Inuit and the Saami: among the former, myopia increased 5 to 10 times with the transition from traditional to semi-urban lifestyle. Some of the traditional Inuit groups studied had no myopic individuals, even among the semi-elderly, whereas short-sightedness is common in most age groups among them now. Diet is a suspected culprit, as is artificial lighting and lack of outdoor activities, but no-one knows for sure. [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1956268/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1956268/) [http://http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1600-0420.1997.tb00639.x/abstract](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1600-0420.1997.tb00639.x/abstract) [the diet angle as a possible cause of modern myopia](http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2120) [More evidence from a recent study on modern kids](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-15427954) Eye problems were certainly there throughout human history, but it does seem that blurry vision was much less of a problem in the distant past than it is now. Yes, a farmer or a skilled tradesman can make do with bad eyesight, but hunting and gathering (the first 90 % of our story) is another matter. Both of these activities often rely on picking up tiny detail on the ground, in the vegetation etc. Doesn’t take much of myopia to be unable to spot a motionless animal hiding in the bush close by, or to be unable to say if the plants “over there” are of the edible or of the quite-similar poisonous variety. I know I was pretty useless with a bow in the woods unless I had corrective lenses on (before I had my eyes fixed). And this is just H-G kindergarten stuff. Tracking game animals, reading the water, taking a tactical win over alert animals in semi-open country etc. is something that just can’t be done without a sharp eyesight. ---
**Author:** ![lazybratsche](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/ba8739/32.png) [@lazybratsche](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lazybratsche)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2011, 12:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-people-handle-blurry-vision-prior-to-corrective-lenses/600934/27 "2011-10-27T12:04:18Z")
> [@panache45](#): > > How? Does bad vision prevent people from reproducing? Probably to some degree. I’ve got eyesight just barely good enough to walk around without killing myself, as long as there aren’t any hazards. (I’m so nearsighted that I can’t really recognize people or even read without my glasses). If I was performing heavy labor as a peasant child? I think there was a good chance that I would have died in some accident. As an adult, I wouldn’t be able to do any fine craft, though maybe I could do something that relies more on tactile feedback. And I’d also guess that my marriage prospects would be harmed by being so blind as to be an invalid. So I’d think there’d be a fairly strong selection against people with eyesight as bad as mine (greater than minus seven diopters). But less severe eysight problems (plus or minus two diopters maybe) probably wasn’t a very significant problem. ---
**Author:** ![MandaJo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ac91a4/32.png) [@MandaJo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MandaJo)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2011, 1:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-people-handle-blurry-vision-prior-to-corrective-lenses/600934/28 "2011-10-27T13:29:33Z")
> [@UDS](#): > > Actually, the big factor lowering life exectancy on reaching adulthood was pregnancy and childbirth, though of course that only affected half the population. War lowered life expectancy for men, but not to the same extent. Both sexes died in agricultural accidents. I suspect that epidemics would lower life expectancies in big chunks, skewing the sample. But the central idea still stands: just because someone was likely to die by 50 doesn’t mean they were elderly at 55. However, hard physical labor, vast amounts of time spent in the sun, and no effective treatments for things like arthritis and other joint issues probably meant that the average 40 year old in 1500 looked older than the average 40 year old today. But they didn’t keel over from old age at 50. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2011, 1:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-people-handle-blurry-vision-prior-to-corrective-lenses/600934/29 "2011-10-27T13:40:51Z")
> [@Trinopus](#): > > I discovered the “pinhole” effect on my own, as a young’un. Curl up your forefinger really tight, to make a pinhole, and look through that. It helps. Squinting also helps. Whether or not people in antiquity developed a pinhole effect, they certainly knew to squint. > > Trinopus (a tad deaf, too…) I have a photograph of a pair of metal “pinhole glasses” from India. Unfortunately, they’re not dated, and I don’t know their provenance, but I suspect that this principle has long been known. I have a suspicion that people used to make single pinhole “monocles” or “lornettes” out of materials like bone, leather, shell, and suchlike, but that these have either deteriorated over time, or have not been recognized as what they were. There _have_ been ancient lenses discovered, although there is for some reason a hard-core contingent of scholars that rabidly believes that they are simply misidentified items that couldn’t _possibly_ be used as corrective devices. On the other hand, there’s a large contingent of generally non-scholars who make outrageous claims for optics in the ancient world (saying that one Mesopotamian lens is clearly a corrective lens made for a particular prescription, or that the Greeks had telescopes). The truth, I strongly suspect, lies between these twoIt’s likely that some lenses were used, but that they were rare and relatively expensive. Inriguingly, one of those people who makes the wild claims makes one that is elatively believable – there are hollow glass globes found in Roman ruins. They have a small hole in them. If you fill them with water, they make excellent magnifiers (the water tends not to escape through the small hole). Such things were easily made, and using water instead of solid glass would go far in countering the poor quality of ancient glass – filled with bubbles, striae, and inclusions. (And the Romans did use suspended oil lamps made of glass spheres that would have also demonstrated the principle). > [@](#): > > There’s a story that one of the Roman emperors (Nero, I think) discovered that he could see much better when he held a big jewel against his eye. The way it was cut just happened to mimic a corrective lens by chance. Thi is well-known because of Henryk Sienkiewicz’s novel _Quo Vadis?_, which features this item. It showede up in the 1950s movie, with Peter Ustinov as Nero looking through his jewel, which was there represented as simply a green stone that imparted a green color to the things he loked at. It’s taken from a omment by Pliny the Elder about Nero watching the gladiators through an emerald. Although lots of places cite this as an early example of a corrective lens, it’s b no means certain exactly what it was, or how it was used. [http://cora.ucc.ie/bitstream/10468/35/1/pubDW\_PlinyNeroEmerald.pdf](http://cora.ucc.ie/bitstream/10468/35/1/pubDW_PlinyNeroEmerald.pdf) ---
**Author:** ![Fear\_Itself](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fear_itself/32/19637_2.png) [@Fear\_Itself](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fear_Itself)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2011, 1:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-people-handle-blurry-vision-prior-to-corrective-lenses/600934/30 "2011-10-27T13:49:47Z")
> [@Musicat](#): > > Since the life expectancy was much shorter then, and many vision problems worsen with age, I imagine it wasn’t as much of a problem for elderly 30 year olds. People lived to advanced ages of 80 or 90 then; 30 was not elderly. Life expectancy was low because of high infant mortality. 30-year-olds didn’t just drop dead. ---
**Author:** ![md2000](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/73ab20/32.png) [@md2000](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/md2000)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2011, 1:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-people-handle-blurry-vision-prior-to-corrective-lenses/600934/31 "2011-10-27T13:50:10Z")
This relates to a comment I read once, suggesting the “seniors” of Roman times were respected percisely becaue, by our definition, they were not. A old person in Rome would be about 55 and outlive a lot of his peers, but if properly fed and healthy he would still be a formidable soldier with the experience to compensate for his age… rather than some grizzled hunched-over 80-year-old. people with vision problems either found an ocupation that suited them, or died. Odds are ther was some selection against vsion problems - but like issues such as diabetes and hemophilia, it seems there are enough spontaneous newbies mutating into the system to compensate for those dropping off. Now, those too are repoducing. ---
**Author:** ![Musicat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/musicat/32/20189_2.png) [@Musicat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Musicat)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2011, 2:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-people-handle-blurry-vision-prior-to-corrective-lenses/600934/32 "2011-10-27T14:10:35Z")
> [@taffygirl](#): > > Pinholes are helpful only for people whose vision impairment is due to astigmatism, as has been explained to me by ophthalmologists. You need to find another opthamologist. A pinhole, while reducing the total amount of light passed, is essentially a spherical lens, and has nothing to do with cylindrical abberations, i.e., astigmatism. > [@Fear\_Itself](#): > > People lived to advanced ages of 80 or 90 then; 30 was not elderly. Life expectancy was low because of high infant mortality. 30-year-olds didn’t just drop dead. Good point, and one others have brought up in this thread already. ---
**Author:** ![Si\_Amigo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/si_amigo/32/2877_2.png) [@Si\_Amigo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Si_Amigo)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2011, 3:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-people-handle-blurry-vision-prior-to-corrective-lenses/600934/33 "2011-10-27T15:26:11Z")
I would think that in hunter gathering days most people with poor eyesight were killed by animals at a young age. It’s a jungle out there after all. ---
**Author:** ![Hari\_Seldon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hari_seldon/32/5173_2.png) [@Hari\_Seldon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hari_Seldon)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2011, 4:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-people-handle-blurry-vision-prior-to-corrective-lenses/600934/34 "2011-10-27T16:21:00Z")
I think we forget how many people died of infectious diseases. I and my two siblings all lost our appendixes before the age of reproduction and my wife’s grandfather died of appendicitis in the early days of the 20th. Cities could not reproduce their population and depended on immigration from the countryside until public sanitation and clean water which didn’t happen until the mid 19th (and was just as fiercely resisted as medicare is today). I have a good friend who grew up in Georgia and whose parents simply refused to believe that he needed glasses and wouldn’t get them for him. He discovered that he could see better using a peephole made from his thumbs and forefingers. When his parents caught him doing that, they would chastise him, still believing that it was some sort of attention getting behavior on his part. Astigmatism was not his problem–or at least not his main problem, so whatever that ophthalmologist said, he was blowing smoke. As for the OP, I do think that reading and other close work encourages myopia. I know that the plural of anecdote is not data, but I had the following experience (and maybe someone could study it further to get data). I got my first glasses in third grade, but starting in fifth grade I used an optometrist who believed that if you left the correction a bit weak, you would discourage the myopia from worsening. FWIW, I was still wearing the same glasses I got at age 14 until my grandson stepped on and mangled them when I was nearly 60. Most of my contemporaries were getting stronger glasses almost every year. They were 20-40 in my left eye and 20-50 in the right. ---
**Author:** ![pohjonen](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pohjonen/32/423_2.png) [@pohjonen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pohjonen)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2011, 6:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-people-handle-blurry-vision-prior-to-corrective-lenses/600934/35 "2011-10-27T18:03:50Z")
> [@johnpost](#): > > in the Middle Ages people with money had seeing eye peasants. _snort_ A good one liner should never go unrewarded. ---
**Author:** ![md2000](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/73ab20/32.png) [@md2000](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/md2000)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2011, 6:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-people-handle-blurry-vision-prior-to-corrective-lenses/600934/36 "2011-10-27T18:17:18Z")
> [@Hari\_Seldon](#): > > … I was still wearing the same glasses I got at age 14 until my grandson stepped on and mangled them when I was nearly 60. What, he didn’t see them? 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![aceplace57](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aceplace57/32/3500_2.png) [@aceplace57](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aceplace57)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2011, 8:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-people-handle-blurry-vision-prior-to-corrective-lenses/600934/37 "2011-10-27T20:08:35Z")
There’s several references in the old testament of older men eyes going dim. I assume they had developed cataracts? Vision problems have been with us for awhile. ---
**Author:** ![MsWhatsit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/eb8c5e/32.png) [@MsWhatsit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MsWhatsit)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2011, 8:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-people-handle-blurry-vision-prior-to-corrective-lenses/600934/38 "2011-10-27T20:14:36Z")
> [@Hari\_Seldon](#): > > As for the OP, I do think that reading and other close work encourages myopia. I know that the plural of anecdote is not data, but I had the following experience (and maybe someone could study it further to get data). I got my first glasses in third grade, but starting in fifth grade I used an optometrist who believed that if you left the correction a bit weak, you would discourage the myopia from worsening. FWIW, I was still wearing the same glasses I got at age 14 until my grandson stepped on and mangled them when I was nearly 60. Most of my contemporaries were getting stronger glasses almost every year. They were 20-40 in my left eye and 20-50 in the right. My childhood optometrist believed the same and left me slightly undercorrected, same as yours. My eyesight worsened yearly until it stabilized somewhere around age 20. I’ve had the same prescription for the last 15 years. I think your eyesight just happened to stabilize a bit earlier. That’s JMO, though. I’m not an expert. ---
**Author:** ![Kenm](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/bc79bd/32.png) [@Kenm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kenm)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2011, 8:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-people-handle-blurry-vision-prior-to-corrective-lenses/600934/39 "2011-10-27T20:17:49Z")
Regarding the Romans and age, big Julie was 56 when he was killed, so the plotters weren’t prepared to wait for the inevitable; it could have been quite a while. Wikipedia says [**16- to 46-year olds were conscripted**](http://waterbill@winnipeg.ca) during the Samnite War. Other sources say 17- to 48-year olds. I’ve read that even 60-year-olds could be conscripted if they were healthy, though now I can’t find the source for that. I wonder if the Roman army employed oculists to examine recruites. Maybe the chart read Video maculae ---
**Author:** ![njtt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/ecd19e/32.png) [@njtt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/njtt)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2011, 10:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-people-handle-blurry-vision-prior-to-corrective-lenses/600934/40 "2011-10-27T22:16:20Z")
> [@Martin\_Hyde](#): > > For most people it wouldn’t matter much. Keep in mind for most of civilization’s history 99% of the population never traveled _anywhere_. Immanuel Kant in his entire 80+ years never went more than a day’s horse ride from his home town of Koenigsberg. And that isn’t strange at all That was in the 18th century, and for a prosperous, and, indeed, famous, Western European at that time it undoubtedly was very strange. That, indeed, is why the story is repeated. To show that Kant was interestingly weird (in modern terms, he was an uber-nerd). What is more, [spectacles were invented back in the 13th century](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectacles#Invention_of_eyeglasses) (i.e., in the middle ages) according to Wikipedia, and were certainly in quite common use well before Kant’s time. In the rest of your post, however, you do not seem to be talking about 18th century professors, but about medieval peasants. No doubt you are right that they did not travel very much, and that (together with their general illiteracy, and other facts about their lifestyle) may indeed have meant that they did not have much need for glasses. Kant’s behavior is emphatically _not_ an instance of this, however. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-people-handle-blurry-vision-prior-to-corrective-lenses/600934.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-people-handle-blurry-vision-prior-to-corrective-lenses/600934.md?page=3)