Émile Javal

Émile Javal 1906

Louis Émile Javal (born May 5, 1839 in Paris , † January 20, 1907 there ) was a French ophthalmologist and politician. He is considered the father of orthoptics .

Émile Javal came from a Jewish family from Seppois-le-Bas in Alsace. He was the eldest son of the banker, politician and agricultural scientist Léopold Javal (1804–1872). He was a classmate of Sully Prudhomme and Marie François Sadi Carnot at the Lycée Bonaparte in Paris. First he became a mining engineer. But because he wanted to cure his sister Sophie from squinting , he decided to become an ophthalmologist. In 1865 he received his doctorate from the Sorbonne . He then worked for Albrecht von Graefe in Berlin.

From 1878 to 1900 Émile Javal was director of an ophthalmological laboratory at the Sorbonne, from 1885 he was a member of the Académie nationale de Médecine . Javal became famous for his work on physiological optics and strabismus. He found that certain patients can be cured of squint with exercise; in this way he also healed his sister. With his student Hjalmar August Schiøtz (1850–1927) he invented an ophthalmometer with which the curvature of the cornea could be determined and astigmatism could be determined. With his studies of eye movements while reading, Javal was also a pioneer in eye movement registration .

After the Franco-Prussian War , in which he served as a medical major, Javal also devoted himself to politics. He regularly wrote articles for the big daily Le Temps . As a member of parliament (1885–1889), he was particularly concerned with questions of hygiene. He drafted the Javal Act, which exempted parents of seven and more children from most taxes. He was a good friend of Émile Zola and was interested in typography and graphology ; he wrote a graphological report for the second trial against Alfred Dreyfus in 1899.

Javal himself suffered from glaucoma for 21 years until he finally went blind at the age of 62. Nonetheless, he continued to write almost all of his letters by hand, with the help of an apparatus he had designed that automatically advanced the paper at the end of each line. He kept fit by riding a three-wheel tandem. Javal was in correspondence with many blind people; His book Entre Aveugles, which contains advice for the blind, emerged from her and his own experiences . A German translation appeared in 1904 under the title Der Blinde und seine Welt .

His passion was Esperanto . From 1903 he also used the language, which he had supported for a long time. In 1905 and 1906 he took part in the first two Esperanto World Congresses in Boulogne-sur-Mer and Geneva, respectively. Language creator Ludwig Zamenhof was his guest in Paris. He financially supported the central office of the Esperantists (Esperantista Centra Oficejo) in Paris, which was founded after the first world congress, and set out a legacy for this in his will.

His marriage to Maria Anna Elissen in 1867 resulted in five children. His granddaughter Louise Weiss (1893–1983) was a politician, writer, journalist and feminist; his great-granddaughter Elisabeth Roudinesco (* 1944) is a psychoanalyst and is considered a leading historian of psychoanalysis.

Émile Javal was an officer in the Legion of Honor . He died of stomach cancer in 1907.

Fonts

• You strabisme, in ses applications à la theory de la vision. Dissertation, Paris 1868.
• with H. Schiötz: Un opthalmomètre pratique. In: Annales d'oculistique. 86. Paris 1881, pp. 5-21.
• Manuel you strabisme. Paris 1896.
• Physiology de la lecture et de l'écriture. Paris 1905. In: Annales d'oculistique. 137. Paris 1907, p. 187.

Web links

• Literature by and about Émile Javal in the catalog of the German National Library
• Louis Émile Javal on whonamedit.com