50 Years Ago
'Masters and Pupils' — The three books under review are approximately equal in price, but this is not true of their value. Two of them are hardy annuals; the third — the Transactions of the International Ophthalmic Optical Congress, 1961 — appears ten years after the previous issue. Those who argue that opticians neglect research will find their fears both confirmed and confounded — confirmed when they read some of the uncritical work ... on contact lenses, and confounded by the high-quality work emanating from British and especially American sources. The trouble with a volume such as this is two-fold: every paper presented at the congress is reproduced, and, what is worse, reproduced in full. Verbosity is a smoke-screen for self-consciousness, and by George! what a difference a whiff of editorial air would have made to this tome. This is not to convey the notion that it does not contain any paper of merit. Le Grand, reproducing data by Bonnet on the cornea, is at his usual instructive best, Ball on dark-adaptation provocative ... By and large, all three volumes are well produced, adequately illustrated, and set in pleasing type. But they would be lighter, not to say cheaper, if editors kept pointing a pencil at the contributors, and — conscious of the rudeness of the gesture — kept asking them “Is this word really necessary?”.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution