Light Ahead

Gabriel Farrell '11, who has been director of the Perkins Institution and Massachusetts School for the Blind since 1931, reported to the March Congress of the New England Council of Optometrists in Boston a happy upset in the status of blindness in this country. Blindness in childhood, he said, is decreasing because of scientific treatment while blindness in old age is increasing, but only because medicine, surgery and education have prolonged life until there are more old people than there used to be. Today only one person in 1000 is blind, or about 130,000 in all in this country.

Last year, Dr. Farrell said, the Perkins Institution, whose training of a little Hanover, N. H., deaf-blindmute girl into a useful citizen in 1837 later brought to its doors young Helen Keller and her inspired teacher, Anne Sullivan Macy, admitted only 256 children with the required 10 per cent or less vision as against 270 the year before. Fewer than 20 per cent of the children in schools for the blind are totally blind.

New England, Dr. Farrell stated, knows more about blindness than any other section of the country. Doctors and specialists in the education of the blind have long since tabulated all its cases and gone about correcting the conditions that threaten the eyes of its young citizens. Blindness in old age is now the problem.