Fraternity-Testvériség, 1964 (42. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1964-10-01 / 10. szám
10 FRATERNITY such discomfort as to make the lens unwearable and deprive a patient of his money’s worth of eye service. Contact lenses have come a long way since Da Vinci produced the same effects by immersing the face in a hemisphere filled with water. He found that irregularities of the cornea — the window of the eye — could be neutralized by placing a substance over it, and suggested that small devices, constructed on a similar pattern, could be adapted to each eye individually. The first practical application, however, did not come until 1877, when F. A. Muller, an artificial eye maker, fitted a glass shell over the eye of a patient. The shell was designed solely for protection of the eye of the patient — whose lids didn’t close completely — and offered no optical correction. However, it is to Muller’s credit that he was the first person to bridge the gap between the theory and practice of contact lenses. Another 50 years and more passed before contact lenses could be used on a widely popular scale. It was in 1948 that Kevin Tuohy introduced plastic corneal contact lenses. Tuohy’s light, thin disks of plastic, measuring less than a third of an ich in diameter, covered about 60 per cent of the cornea of the eye. Held in place by the simple capillary attraction of tears, these new lenses soon replaced their much larger predecessors, the scleral contact lenses, which covered not only the cornea, but also much of the rest of the eye as well. The older lenses had to float on a bath of special wetting fluid, and could seldom be worn for more than four or five hours at a stretch. Modern micro-lenses, small slips of plastic which can be scaled down to as little as .006 of an inch, have raised the comfortable wearing time to most of the waking hours. SUNDAY SCHOOL SMILES Despite the heat and the humidity, Mrs. Hegyes finally managed to get the dinner on the table for her guests. She asked her seven- year-old Gizella to say the blessing. Gizella hedged: “But, Mummy, I don’t know any.” Her mother was adamant. “Oh, just say what you’ve heard me say.” Obediently Gizi bowed her head and said: “Oh, Lord, why did I invite these people here on this hot day?” * * ★ Little Zoli set out for Sunday School with two dimes clutched in his fist. His father had instructed him to put one in the collection plate and keep the other one for himself. Blithely skipping along, he suddenly tripped, dropped one of the dimes and watched it roll into a sewer opening. “Well”, exclaimed Zoli, “there goes the Lord’s dime!” ★ ★ ★ Petite Piroska prayed to God for a thousand new dolls for her birthday. Naturally, she didn’t get them. Her father, attempting to teach her, said: “I guess God didn’t answer your prayers.” “Oh, yes, He did”, Piroska replied, “He answered me all right. He said, ‘NO’.” I. S.
