Before the invention of glasses, were people with bad vision just doomed to a miserable existence?
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It’s an interesting fact that, until recently, women tended to be nearsighted (can’t see far away) and men tended to be farsighted (can’t see close up). Since women were more likely to do close up work like sewing or checking for rot in stored food, and men were hunting, vision problems of this type caused less of a problem.
You couldn’t be a scribe or archer or scout, but in a highly illiterate society most jobs didn’t require good vision. You can till the land and hammer out armor plates and tan leather just fine even if you’re badly nearsighted. Only nearly blind people would struggle.
You probably couldn’t afford a horse, but if you could it’s a self-driving vehicle.
They honestly didn’t know that their eyes were bad.
I never knew I needed glasses until my first eye exam as a child. Then all the sudden I realized that you could see individual leaves or bricks from a distance.
Only if they were extremely nearsighted. In a primitive world, there wasn’t a lot of reason to be able to see things extremely close to you in detail, that because with the advent of reading. Not being able to see far away would be a much bigger deal.
But yes, like many disabilities that today are only an inconvenience, if your eyesight was bad enough, things would be pretty rough.
Before writing, there was not much need for 20/20 vision. Nor was there need to live past reproduction age, evolutionary speaking. Bad vision is much more prevalent now because it is more likely to be passed down, and because we tax our eyes more with small details, and we live longer where eyesight fails more often.
yes it sucked when glasses weren’t an option
varying degrees of handicap depending how bad it was and the stuff you had to do everyday
glasses came MUCH later than writing, and various forms of magnifying glasses came before glasses
effectively shut you off from doing a bunch of stuff
There’s a bunch of bullshit answers in this thread. The _truth_ is that while blindness or bad vision due to eye damage, parasites, cataracts, etc, was relatively more common in the past than it is today, on the whole people had better vision because _nearsightedness_ was very rare. Because nearsightedness is mostly a disease of the modern world. So most vision problems in the past couldn’t have been fixed by glasses, and the main vision problem fixed by glasses in the modern world was vanishingly rare.
Nearsightedness results from spending time indoors a lot as a child. The lack of strong illumination interferes with the mechanism controlling the growth of the eyes, resulting in eyes that are too long and as a result causing nearsightedness because the image focuses in front of the retina. This has been demonstrated in animal models and the biochemical mechanism is understood. This results in a very well documented pattern…in societies which are not industrialized, nearsightedness is rare to practically nonexistant. Surveys of hunter-gatherers and other groups living in traditional ways find almost no one who is nearsighted. As societies industrialize, nearsightedness skyrockets (there’s a very good dataset from Singapore on this).
Vision is important…all this nonsense about you not really needing to see more than a blur to spot predators and prey is baloney. Animals in the wild are camoflaged, hide effectively among the terrain, and are quite hard to spot without good vision to see them. And that’s not to mention foraging for plants, which are nearly impossible to identify at a distance without good vision.
if your sight was poor enough to where you couldn’t preform basic tasks then about all you could do is sit near the entrance of a town and be a beggar.
Yes and no. If they had vision bad enough to make it impossible to do menial labor- they had to beg/ rely on others. Not many people were literate, so not being able to read wasn’t a big deal for those that could still do whatever job they needed.
The severity of the impariment is what’s important. If your eyesight was so bad that you were effectively blind, then yes, their life would require assistance. But if it was just blurry vision, most wouldn’t be affected very much. Unless fine details are required most people with poor vision can navigate the world just fine. They just have difficulty with fine details. Even people with severe nearfar-sightedness can still navigate their surroundings with sight perfectly fine, but they obviously wouldn’t be ideal for tasks that require fine details. Examples include identifying small animal species from large distances, or manipulating an advanced tool up close.
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