Who on a heck is Dr. Bates?

According to Wikipedia, here’s a few biographical facts:

Bates graduated A.B. from Cornell University in 1881 and received his medical degree at the college of physicians and surgeons in 1885. He formulated a theory about vision health, and published the book Perfect Sight Without Glasses in 1920. Parts of Bates' approach to correcting vision disorders were based on psychological principles, which was contrary to many of the medical theories of the time and remain so. The Bates Method still enjoys some limited acceptance as a modality of alternative medicine.
Bates treated many patients, who claimed to have been cured of vision defects, especially myopia. This brought him into conflict with his peers. He defended himself by claiming that other physicians were in thrall to the establishment.

Not much of a biography there. But it does not really matter. As you can see Wikipedia and medical establishment in general do not like Bates much. His main work “The Cure of Imperfect Sight by Treatment Without Glasses” (later edited into “Perfect Sight Without Glasses”) is a result of years of research and study of the human eyes in various conditions. He and his clinical staff also published “Better Eyesight” magazine (from 1919-1930) of which his book is condensed version. It has a nice section of theory on common eyes disorders which he called anomalies of reflection and those include conditions like myopia (nearsightedness), hyperopia (farsightedness) and astigmatism. He also touches on problems of squint and cataract. The book is full of case histories. And the main part is devoted to techniques of relaxation.

Bates (1860-1931) has never been popular with a medical establishment even during his own lifetime though he is the one that got positive and definite results. Just to give you an idea he found the way to keep schoolchildren’s eyesight in good condition, his method was used with tremendous success. Then for some reason it’s been dropped. Well, I think we all can guess the real reason behind it.

Bates was a pioneer in the science of ophthalmology and hit upon a wonderful way to preserve the eyesight. If the eye doctors gave their patients a copy of the Bates’ book instead of the first pair of glasses we would not have this pandemics of eye anomalies.