Book Review

Second Sight

N Engl J Med 1994; 330:1463-1464May 19, 1994

Article

Second Sight
By Robert V. Hine. 203 pp. Berkeley, Calif., University of California Press, 1993. $20. ISBN: 0-520-08195-1

Close your eyes and imagine a way to finish reading this review. For most of us, the loss of useful vision would make the practice of our profession an impossibility. We often take our sight for granted until we are faced with its loss. Second Sight is a compassionate account of a man confronting incremental loss of vision as a young adult from uveitis associated with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. The uveitis eventually caused the author to lose his sight in his 40s. As both a writer and a professor of history, he chronicles his gradual entry into the world of the blind. Although the book is written well and the story is presented with modesty, the spirit of the book is embodied not in those experiences but in the enlightenment gained with the return of the author's vision 15 years later. This “second sight” was the result of advances in the medical and surgical management of inflammatory eye disease.

To come to terms with his loss of sight, Hine contemplates the writings of other blind authors. He quotes James Thurber's witty description of a “blindfolded man looking for a black sock on a black carpet.” During his “blind period,” Hine continued to work as a professor of history. Using student readers and Braille note cards hidden in his pockets, he was able to deliver lectures and carry out his teaching responsibilities. Despite this accomplishment, he writes of discouraging limits to the practice of his profession: “But since blindness had forced on me a choice of subject, did that not rob me of one level of objectivity? The historian should be able to wander freely amid his data, but the data were being chosen for me. I was not in control. Another filter, another screen stood between me and the truth.” The book also touches on the ways human relationships are influenced by the loss of vision: “It was hard to hear her say that. I knew what she meant: the eyes are conduits of expression. Through them flow love and hate, confidence and suspicion, acceptance and condemnation. Without them, how does a child relate to a parent”?

After 15 years of blindness, the author regained his sight. The experience of blindness showed him that imagination and the other senses are both wonderful and wanting. With the return of his eyesight, roads had widened, doorways were higher, faces of friends and family members older, and colors brighter than he had remembered. Pictures were rediscovered and voices matched to new faces.

I certainly experienced beauty -- in music, in bird songs, in the wind, in holding lovely shapes, forms. Now, however, to the sound of the wind is added the movement of tall grasses and white clouds; to music, the instrument; to the bird song, the bird. . . . Sight must hold a priority among the senses in the realm of the beautiful.

The message of Second Sight and the experiences of Robert Hine can be embraced by anyone who cares for the blind or by those personally confronting the loss of vision. Even readers whose vision is not fading will be reminded of the true gift in sight. More important, Hine shows that a diminution of eyesight does not denote a corresponding loss of insight.

Mitchell Opremcak, M.D.
Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210