His personal life consisted of three marriages. Both his first and second wife passed away, and Bates expired married to Emily C. Lierman, his third wife.

     In his younger years, Bates was a brilliant man. He graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Agriculture from Cornell University in 1881 and later obtained a medical degree from Columbia University in New York City in 1885.

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Professional Life

 

     Shortly after getting his medical degree, a year later, Bates started leaving his mark on the medicine of his time. He created an operation that gave relief to a particular type of deafness. It involved incising the eardrum membrane. This operation from 1886 is still in use today! In addition, he also discovered the uses for the substance produced by the suprarenal gland in eye surgeries. At the time the name “adrenalin” was not used. Namely, he discovered the astringent and homostatic properties of adrenalin.

     In the years that followed, Bates was a clinical assistant at the Manhattan Eye and Ear Hospital and an attending physician at multiple hospitals and dispensaries. Places such as….. He was also an instructor for ophthalmology at the New York Post Graduate Hospital and Medical School. Ultimately, however, he was dismissed from there for curing ophthalmologists of their myopia. The school was putting glasses on myopic doctors while Bates was advising them to remove their glasses.

 

Bates and Eyesight

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     Dr. William Horotio Bates’s legacy as we know it today started in 1891. The first article of his on the elimination of myopia was published in a medical journal; this was the first of his many publications in the New York Medical Journal. A full list of his medical publications can be found here.

     The root of all the findings and publications by bates was he did not agree with the orthodox views of vision disorders. William Bates had alternative models and explanations of how vision and more specific disorders, such as myopia, function. He did not believe that any other part of the body could heal and improve, but the eyes were stuck in a static state.

 

     Bates studied a multitude of eye disorders such as farsightedness and astigmatism, but the focus was on myopia. Bates left the hospitals and dispensaries behind and started his own experimental work in 1896. At the public schools of Grand Forks, North Dakota he ran a program that implemented his methods of natural vision correction among students and teachers. In the 8 years that this program was run, the myopia prevalence among 1,500 school children dropped from 6% to less than 1%.

 

     Dr. Bates continued his work in New York City. The bates system of relieving and preventing myopia was introduced in the New York Public Schools among 10,000 school children. Reports indicate that 1,000 of the 3,000 children who had imperfect vision were able to go back to having normal vision. Both his myopia prevention programs achieved great success and were published in the New York Medical Journal in 1911: The prevention of myopia in school children.

 

     Aside from school children, Bates was helping the general population through “clinic days.” These clinic days were first held at the Harlem hospital and later on moved to Bates’s private practice. Instead of prescribing glasses, he would teach the patients how to see; they were run by Emily Lierman and Bates himself.

 

     Although Bates did a lot to cure the vision in the community, its lesser-known Bates had presbyopia. This condition usually happens with older age as the ocular lens hardens; It makes it harder to focus on nearby objects because the lens loses its elasticity. Bates, however, believed this condition like many was due to strain on the eyes: “The first patient that I cured of presbyopia was myself.” Presbyopia, along with other eye disorders such as myopia, was also curable.

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The Bates Legacy

 

     Bates spread his knowledge and techniques by educating and training others. He had many students that followed his footsteps such as Margaret Darst Corbett, a pupil that taught his method at her School of Eye Education. 

     In 1920, Dr. Bates published Perfect sight without glasses, the book that gave rise to what we know as the bates method. It was a complete text that contained all of his theories, case studies and techniques/procedures for natural vision improvement. Since the copyrights expired, the entire original book is in the public domain. Aside from the book other print media left behind were copies of his magazine. 

     From 1919 to 1930, Bates’s Better Eyesight magazine published monthly copies. The writings were true stories that Lierman and Bates encountered; they were meant to fun to read and interesting. You can check out the archived magazine copies here.

 

     Even as he neared the end of his life, the ophthalmologist continued to treat patients and spread his knowledge. Dr. Bates passed away at age 70 as a result of the Black Flu epidemic. But today, his natural vision improvement movement lives on.