Ophthalmology, Popular Physiology, and the Market Revolution in Vision, 1800–1850

It cannot have escaped the notice of every medical observer that an unusual prevalence of diseases of the eye marks the period in which we live. Indeed, they are so prevalent, that they may be considered one of its common and peculiar trials.

Edward Reynolds, Hints to Students on the Use of the Eyes, 1835

In America the purely practical side of science is cultivated admirably, and trouble is taken about the theoretical side immediately necessary to application.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835

The scopic regime of modernity may best be understood as a contested terrain, rather than a harmoniously integrated complex of visual theories and practices.

Martin Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” 1988¹

The practice of ophthalmology experienced tremendous growth in the first half of the nineteenth century. At least five eye hospitals opened in American cities between 1820 and 1850, offering venues for the practice of a burgeoning field of surgeons increasingly devoted to ophthalmic pursuits that included medicinal and surgical treatment, experimentation, publication, and the education of others. Outside this increasingly codified arena of practice, opticians, reform physiologists, and others concerned with matters of vision published a spate of treatises explaining in lay terms the eye’s basic mechanisms and capacities. These works also instructed readers, already well versed in homespun methods of eye care, in diagnosing a wide range of ocular maladies and in caring for their eyes in order to maintain properly functioning sight, which had become crucial for navigating a cultural terrain significantly altered by market revolution.

Amid vast technological, economic, and social change, new trades sprang up around the exchange of printed information—typesetters and printers, newspaper editors and journalists, clerks and copyists, to name but a few. But as this expanded culture of print proliferated, new perceptual problems loomed. As a result of the profusion of texts—printed ledgers and billheads, cheap newspapers and broadsides—and the dense visual nature of their myriad forms, antebellum culture registered the early stages of overstimulation, a phenomenon typically associated with the urban culture of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In response to this wave of new media, the viewing practices they formed, and the peculiar conditions of seeing in densely populated urban environments, ophthalmologists, opticians, reform physiologists, and their publics voiced a range of concerns regarding the toll these phenomena and practices were taking on human vision. Taken together, these constituents established standards and practices concerning the properties and maintenance of the eyes that delineated ways of seeing particular to this time and place. They suggested ways to defend the eyes against disease and debilitation and posited a model of vision that coalesced around the needs of production and consumption in the antebellum decades.

The second half of the nineteenth century has been hailed as ophthalmology’s “golden” age, initiated by Herman von Helmholtz’s introduction of the ophthalmoscope and marked by increasing specialization, clinical sophistication, and institutional codification. The development of ophthalmology and the dissemination of ophthalmic principles in the first half of the century, however, situated them as integral segments of the social, cultural, and economic transformations that historians have associated with the market revolution. Ophthalmology’s professional development in the early republic, set in relation to the growth and spread of reform physiology and other popular measures for maintaining properly functioning vision, illuminates the formation of ideas about the nature of vision and the changing status of observing subjects in ways that shed light on the role of this “noblest” of senses amid the new chaos of market life. Approaching human vision as a market phenomenon helps to situate the human body as a cog in the early nineteenth century’s emerging commercial culture and frames the historical construct of the market revolution as an embodied phenomenon centered on, but not exclusive to, the eyes of observing subjects.²

The problem of the observer has long occupied scholars in art history and philosophy. But in the past few decades the status of this observer, increasingly situated in both time and place, has received...