The description that follows, which is quoted by
Fournier and is readily accessible to any one, is well worth
reading, as it contains an account of the first sensations of
light, objects, distance, etc., and minor analogous thoughts, of
an educated and matured mind experiencing its first sensations of
sight.
Hansell and Clark say that the perplexities of learning to see
after twenty-six years of blindness from congenital disease, as
described by a patient of Franke, remind one of the experience of
Shelley's Frankenstein. Franke's patient was successfully
operated on for congenital double cataract, at twenty-six years
of age. The author describes the difficulties the patient had of
recognizing by means of vision the objects he had hitherto known
through his other senses, and his slowness in learning to
estimate distances and the comparative size of objects.
Sight is popularly supposed to be occasionally restored without
the aid of art, after long years of blindness. Benjamin Rush saw
a man of forty-five who, twelve years before, became blind
without ascertainable cause, and recovered his sight equally
without reason. St. Clair mentions Marshal Vivian, who at the age
of one hundred regained sight that for nearly forty years had
gradually been failing almost to blindness, and preserved this
new sight to the time of his death.
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