One hundred years ago
DURING the interesting discussion of the British Association on colour- blindness yesterday week, which was in many respects too scientific for popular apprehension, Dr Michael Foster men- tioned a curious fact, that smoking, if persisted in for a long time, and particu- larly if the smoker confined himself to a single kind of tobacco, produced `colour-blindness in the central field of the red'. 'We all of us were more or less colour-blind in the outside of the pupil; but those people who were called colour-blind, really, had, as it were, a patch cut out in the middle of their retina, where they were colour-blind.' We suppose the practical inference to be that inveterate smokers are sure to injure their sense of colour, but that they will injure it less if they avoid habituating themselves to using one kind of tobacco — that is, if they frequently change the kind.
The Spectator, 11 September 1886
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