About the Revisions
Dr. Bates had the great gift of being able to teach people how to heal their vision and see normally. Dr. Bates intended his book for, as he put it, “the lay reader. But I, as a physician, found his writing impenetrable. At times reading it was like trying to hack through thick brush with a machete. Even so, the more I persisted and gleaned the meaning, the more gratitude and wonderment I felt. From this gratitude arose a wish that anyone interested could read this book.
I have the gift of being able to edit scientific writing, however technical, into plain everyday language that anyone can understand.
Take, for example, a sentence like, “The ability of the eyeball to change shape is important in the process of seeing up close. This is even more true for the far-sighted eye than for the normally-sighted eye.”
I imagine if Bates had written this sentence, it might have come out as “The plasticity of the globe is important in in the process of accommodation – this being the constant case, at least in clinic, and even more-so for the hypermetropic globe when held in comparison to our unwavering ideal – the emmetropic globe.” If trying to decipher that wording doesn’t make you squint, you are a better reader than I.
Some of the terminology Dr. Bates used is outdated. Even a modern person familiar with ophthalmology wouldn’t immediately understand what he was writing about. The term “hypermetropia,” for example, has not really been used since 1940.
Outdated or not, I translated all technical terms into common English terms, except for those very few which the reader cannot do without. To make sure the reader can understand what key terms remained, I wrote an introductory chapter explaining them in detail. In addition I created a glossary for quick reference. These key terms include words such as “nearsightedness,”farsightedness” and “astigmatism.”
Then came the work of untangling the run-on sentences. It was like trying to unravel a very messy ball of yarn. After lovingly rephrasing the text into shorter, more digestible sentences, I had to make sure I understood the meaning. In some cases the text was ambiguous. Then I would search for clarification among the over 1,200 pages of Dr. Bates’s magazine (“Better Eyesight Magazine”). [A complete scan Better Eyesight Magazine is available below as a free download (155.7 MB)] I would also search in the teachings of the many current teachers of the Bates Method.
After working on all this for years, I am very happy with the result.
As the front piece for his original book Dr. Bates wrote a passage he titled “The Fundamental Principle.” In this passage he gives the very core of his approach to healing the vision, which is to relax the eyes.
As a gift, and to give a sense of how I have edited this book, I include below first his original passage, and then my edited version of it.
Dr Bates Origninal:
Dr Bates’s Original:
My edited version:
My edited version:
