Aniseikonia

Reading eyes grow blurred, skip words and lines. Heads ache, nerves twitch, stomachs misbehave. Students fail in their classes. Motorists and aviators misjudge distances, sometimes fatally. Many a person so afflicted has gone from one eye doctor to another, without relief. He was suffering from no ailment known to ophthalmology.

Last week to the New York Academy of Medicine, Dartmouth's Professor Adelbert Ames Jr. announced that his research department of physiological optics had found the ailment which may cause these disorders, had developed a means of correcting it. Though only about 1,000 cases had been observed, he estimated that 20% to 30% of all eye sufferers may be affected by a condition which he named aniseikonia. Said Professor Ames to the Manhattan doctors: "I feel that before aniseikonia was discovered we were somewhat in the position of the astronomers studying the solar system before all the important planets had been located. The effects of the unknown ones could be felt but they were still unknown, and the relationships could not be worked out. They are now worked out, as it is hoped that some day aniseikonia's will be."

Aniseikonia is Greek for "unequal images." When the sufferer looks at any object, the image reflected in the retina of one eye differs in size and shape from that in the other. The struggle of the brain's visual centre to fuse these two images brings aches, pains and frazzled nerves. Sometimes it cannot fuse them.

The Dartmouth researchers are not yet sure of aniseikonia's cause. They think it may be some malformation of the front part of the eye, or a larger number of light-sensitive cones in one retina than in the other. To detect the condition they have devised a complex instrument of peepholes, dots and lights, called the Ophthalmo-Eikonometer. To correct the condition they, and American Optical Co., have developed "iseikonic spectacles" with miniature telescope lenses to balance images.

Tall, ruddy, good-humored Professor Ames started out to be a lawyer, turned to art, ended up on Dartmouth's faculty 15 years ago. Last week the Press was ready to hail him as a new Hero of Science. But Professor Ames resisted any such public acclamation. In the first place, he insisted, other members of his Dartmouth staff deserved as much credit as he. And, ''It was research and that's all about it."

Professor Ames's father, who died last year at 97, was the last Yankee governor of Mississippi, the last surviving Union general of the Civil War. He was long the daily golf partner of John Davison Rockefeller at Ormond Beach, Fla. When Adelbert Ames Jr. set out to track down aniseikonia in 1927, it was John Davison Rockefeller Jr. who furnished the money. Last week the New York Herald Tribune reported the fact that Son Rockefeller himself has aniseikonia, that he has obtained considerable relief from his iseikonic spectacles.

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