Books: An examination of the history of blindness in the Western world

Bloomsbury, £20

Selina Mills describes a shocking scene at King’s Cross Station, London. Arriving at the ticket barrier following a trip to Scotland, the author had removed her false eye and handed it to the guard, prompting gasps of astonishment from those queuing behind her. Yet what’s disturbing about this scenario is not the Perspex eyeball glaring accusingly from Mills’s palm, but the fact she’d felt driven to rip it from its socket in order to convince said guard that she is, in fact, visually impaired and not feigning disability in order to get a concessionary travel card. “I mean, you can see all right, can’t you?” he’d exclaimed. “I saw you walking down the platform, bright and breezy. You are faking it!”

“I’ll tell you what is fake,” fumed an incandescent Mills. “Here! Let me show you …”

Profoundly distressing as this incident clearly was for Mills, who was born blind in her right eye and with limited (and diminishing) vision in her left, it’s described with the vivacious wit she deploys throughout Life Unseen, a fascinating blend of memoir and social history. Mills’s curiosity for her subject had been piqued by the discovery in the Zagros mountains of a Neanderthal skeleton which bore clear signs not only of blindness, but of comparative longevity. Dying aged around 45, the individual had outlived most of his contemporaries, proving that – even 50,000 years ago – people with visual impairments had succeeded in negotiating the hazards of an inhospitable world. Intrigued, Mills began trawling through the annals of the British Library in order to uncover the story of blindness.

And what a cracking tale it is, mixing reflections on science, art, literature and religion with Mills’s own experience of an “ocularcentric” world in which light and sight are “metaphorical touchstones” for truth and understanding while blindness often denotes stupidity or confusion, and was once linked to ungodliness or sin. (Think of Biblical references to “the blind leading the blind” and Oedipus gouging out his own eyes as an act of penance.)

Forced to beg or scratch a banal existence making baskets, blind people were, in medieval times, often the butt of cruel entertainments. In Paris, crowds roared at the supposedly comedic antics of a sightless quartet competing to kill a pig with sticks. Nor does Mills find much comfort in a literary canon filled with tragic victims such as Baudelaire’s “frightful” mannequins or inspirational innocents like Dickens’s “poor blind Bertha”.

“In many ways,” she writes, “the way blindness has been represented, even by the greats, makes me feel lonely and depressed.” Where, she wonders, are the ordinary bods who just happen to number among the one billion people worldwide, including two million Brits, with complete or severe vision loss? And given its prevalence, why is blindness routinely construed as a state that needs “fixing”?

As a broadcaster and journalist, Mills spent years working in Rome and her descriptions of that city’s scents, sounds and – yes – sights, are wonderful, though she seems to have been plagued by earnest nuns stopping her in the street and promising to pray for the “poverina”. “Who was this poor and pitiable person they were praying for?” wonders Mills. To the annoyance of a cameraman who once asked her to “act more blind” while broadcasting, the visually impaired don’t all walk around “like zombies in Scooby-Doo”. And despite centuries of audacious medical interventions including leeches attached to eyeballs, heads encased in plaster or horrendous surgeries that sometimes led to fatal haemorrhaging, not everyone wants to be “cured”.

All the same, Mills doesn’t underplay the precious nature of sight or the importance of pioneering science in helping people to see. In her own case, surgery to improve the fading vision of her “wonky” left eye has been deemed overly risky and she is far from blasé about the fact she might soon lose it altogether. While researching Life Unseen, she officially becomes registered blind and acquires a white stick, which, although useful, reminds her that she now wears “the uniform of blindness”.

But she gets around, gamely conducting research expeditions including a visit to the Blind and Sight Saving School in Vinton, Iowa, which was attended by the sister of Little House on the Prairie author, Laura Ingalls Wilder during the 1880s. As anyone who watched the 1970s TV drama series knows, Mary Ingalls lost her sight aged 14 and went on to become a teacher at that inspirational establishment, later marrying one of her colleagues. Unfortunately, that’s not quite how things worked out for the real Mary Ingalls, who neither became a teacher nor married. Instead, after seven years as a Vinton school boarder, she spent the rest of her life making hammocks and Mills’s impressions were of an institution reeking of “disinfectant and paternalism”: a place where children as young as six were isolated from their sighted peers within a regimented environment that prepared them for dreary futures doing menial jobs.

Mills’s own upbringing could not have been more different. Her parents encouraged her independence, insisting she attend mainstream schools and learn to ski, ride – and even drive, on the pretext that, though she couldn’t legally manoeuvre a vehicle, she may one day need to grab the steering wheel from a motorist who’d suffered a heart attack.

As well as looking into history’s rear-view mirror, Mills surveys some of the technological innovations that improve her quality of life. There’s a hilarious account of a cinema trip with her sister, when the Audio Description device in her ear sent her into peals of inappropriate laughter by chronicling Fifty Shades of Grey’s bedroom scenes “with the enthusiasm of someone reading their tax returns”. She also looks ahead, to a time when robo-cars may actually put blind people in the driving seat or see pioneering innovations such as Braille become obsolete.

Spirited, irreverent and full of repeatable facts (did you know that the old cockney phrase, “cor blimey”, derives from the 12th-century exclamation, “God blind me”?), Life Unseen offers an illuminating peek into one woman’s world, and asks searching questions of us all in terms of the different ways in which we perceive our world.

There are no glib answers because blindness, as Life Unseen demonstrates, is a subject riven with ambiguity and complexity. In this important and hugely enjoyable book, Mills clears away some of the myths and injustices that surround it.