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This little volume is an important contribution to our knowledge of an industrial disease, popularly known as 'miners' blindness', that incapacitates thousands of workmen, and by which the country loses many millions of pounds a year. The main part of the report is taken up by a masterly study of the condition by Dr. Lister Llewellyn, the foremost authority on the subject. He deals at length with all its aspects, historical, symptomatological, diagnostic and aetiological. He has established beyond doubt that the chief determining factor is the matter of lighting in mines and has made practical suggestions about how this may be remedied.
To readers of this JOURNAL, however, the subject proves to have an unexpected psychological interest. Llewellyn and others have shewn that there is a curiously small correlation observable between the presence or severity of the disease itself, which essentially consists in ocular nystagmus, and the extent to which the men actually suffer. Pronounced quivering of the eyes may co-exist with little subjective discomfort, while a man may be totally incapacitated when his physical signs are quite slight. As the practical effects of the condition depend on the amount of suffering rather than the mere presence of nystagmus, attention therefore becomes directed to the nature of the factor determining the former, especially as that determining the latter is now known. It is agreed that this new factor is a purely mental one and the committee therefore called in a psychologist, Dr. Rivers, to express his views