"My publisher, Pickering and Chatto, have made available the introduction to my recent book - which I share with you here. The index is also available as a free file, and you can find that on the publisher's page for my book, which is: http://www.pickeringchatto.com/monographs/vision_science_and_literature_1870_1920"

This article aims to reconstruct and analyse the late-19th century debates about the standards used for measuring eyesight. It deals in particular with the creation of eye charts, one of the main tools used to assess visual acuity. My argument is organized as follow: I start by providing an account of the historical background against which modern eye charts were developed; the best-known of them will be discussed together with their characteristics. Next, I analyse the debates among ophthalmologists of the time about the definition of "normal eye" and "normal vision", and show the divergence between the ones theoretically formulated and the data collected during clinical researches. Finally, I consider the question of sight measurement, looking on the one hand at the specialists' desire to standardize a framework for measuring visual acuity, and on the other at the many obstacles in the way of achieving that aim.

In medieval and renaissance Europe a range of medical practitioners treated diseases of the eye. These included oculists—surgical specialists whose goal was to preserve and restore vision—barber surgeons, learned surgeons, and physicians. Did oculists and barber surgeons have a theory of vision that informed their practice? To what extent did they consider the various opinions about vision derived from Galen, Aristotle, or the writers on mathematical optics (i.e., the perspectivists)? What was their understanding of ocular anatomy, how was this knowledge arrived at, and how did this relate to their understanding of both visual theory and surgery, particularly cataract surgery? What about the reverse: did practicing ocular surgery affect one’s anatomical (and physiological) understanding of the eye, and did this practice-based knowledge of the eye influence the accounts of vision by university trained physicians, philosophers, or mathematicians? To address these questions I examine three figures. Georg Bartisch (c. 1535-1607) was a renowned oculist with no university education who lived most of his life in Dresden. His Ophthalmodouleia (1583), written is German, is the most significant work on eye surgery and diseases in the sixteenth century. Ambroise Paré (1510-1590) was perhaps the most famous barber surgeon in the sixteenth century, and his encyclopedic and enormously popular work on surgery, while written in French, was translated into Latin and many vernacular languages. Finally, Hieronymus Fabricius ab Aquapendente (1533-1619) was the chair of surgery, and then surgery and anatomy, at the University of Padua, the most renowned medical school in Europe at the time. His Pentateuchos chirurgicum (1592), written in Latin, was republished many times over the course of the seventeenth century, and after 1619 this work was published together with his Operationes chirurgicae. I show that, for a time, ocular surgeons exerted a crucial, if indirect, influence on both anatomy and visual theory. Oculists developed their own understanding of the eye through manual practice: theirs was an eye whose interior dimensions and configuration were constructed more through the probing touch of the cataract needle than through dissection. Before the end of the sixteenth century, this oculist’s eye appears to have been a key reason why anatomists since Galen so often depicted a large aqueous chamber compared to modern models of the eye (or indeed, Fabricius’s model), and to the extent that they considered the interior configuration of actual eyes, mathematicians and philosophers accommodated their notions to the experiences of oculists, rather than the reverse. I also demonstrate a shift towards the end of the sixteenth century in which the influence of the oculist’s eye was diminished

From the confluence of new materials and new audiences brought about by print emerged new faces and new uses for them: character heads in genres such as physiognomies and cosmographies began to reflect the results of observation. Mid-sixteenth-century physiognomies, books that coached viewers how to read the profiles of their friends and neighbours, aspired to present empirical knowledge to their readers. Despite the tightrope they tread between mimesis and idealisation and their heavy reliance on convention, early modern prints were confident about their ability to cue observations and calibrate sightings, and their organisational aptitude should not be overlooked. Game changers in shaping disciplinary activity related to empirical experience, generic portraits, as this essay will argue, developed skills like visual acuity.

The present paper constitutes a qualitative discursive investigation of the nineteenth century case reports from ophthalmology derived from a specialist American medical journal, and focuses on citation as well as on authorial and patient’s presence. Regarding the first aspect, the present study generally confirms the results of the previous research, i.e. significant subjectivity, directness and informal character of the texts at hand. However, it also provides another insight into the scholarly communication in the nineteenth century, focusing on how patients are positioned therein, which has not received significant attention in the literature of the subject. Additionally, the paper offers an overview of the studies on specific aspects of scientific prose of the nineteenth century, including the medical context, as well as attempts to show the relation between the texts analysed and the context of their production and functioning, following the tradition of Genre Rhetorical Studies.

This course examines the long eighteenth century (circa 1665-1830) through the lens of its visualization technologies. Beginning with the popularization of the microscope and telescope, we will trace the impact of new ways of seeing on the literary imagination. With the revelation of active worlds teeming below the normal threshold of human perception, experimental science rejuvenated ancient theories about a “Great Chain” or hierarchy of beings large and small. This attention finds poetic corollaries in intensely focused observations of the world and in imaginative projections into the lives of insects and animals. But while the microscope opened new vistas to exploration, it also encouraged nightmarish fantasies about living with acutely enhanced sensation. Rather than mourning the limitations of our senses, many argued, we should rejoice at our obliviousness to overwhelming details. Thus Alexander Pope would famously proclaim: “Why has not man a microscopic eye? For this plain reason, man is not a fly.” In addition to the relativizing of mankind’s stature in the cosmos caused by the multiplication of worlds, we will also explore the developing role of the English “spectator” as established through the circulation of periodicals, and the role of elaborate theatrical “spectacles” involving sophisticated machinery and special effects in popular entertainment. In considering how eighteenth-century writers grappled with revelations of mediated vision, we will learn to attend closely to the written word across genres.