18th. Sunday. A farmer’s daughter was brought to me – she was 1 1/2 years old and blind. They asked me whether it was cataracts. I examined the eye and found that it was quite clear, just like a healthy eye, and I was on the point of concluding that it was amaurosis. But I soon found that it was not that either, for the child loved to stand in the light by the window. I observed, however, that the eyes made very strange convulsive movements and that, when the child was spoken to and wanted to look, its eyes turned up so that only the whites were visible. The child had been born that way. I asked the mother whether she had seen anyone turn or twist their eyes like that when she was pregnant. “Yes”, she says, “I saw my mother or mother-in-law who was dying at the time and, not wanting to desert her, I sat with her until her death struggle was over”. Thus these tears. I think, therefore, that the child was not actually blind but that the focus in the eyeball lay so far to the side that the eye could not see except when it was directed according to the source of light – in much the same way as we observe in people with a squint. The natural position of the eye in this patient was below the upper eyelid, but the child could see with half the eye because half the pupil emerged when the eyelid was raised. I wonder what the cure is? I know of none, unless specially ground glasses might help. I advised them to place the cradle with its foot to the source of light so that, with an effort, the child might force its eye to receive the sweet light of day now while everything is still flexible. That is the way Bartholin cured people with a squint.