Louis Émile Javal

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

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

From 1878 to 1900 Émile Javal was the director of an ophthalmological laboratory at the Sorbonne, from 1885 he was a member of the Académie nationale de Médecine. Javal gained fame for his work on physiological optics and squint. He found that certain patients can be cured with exercises from squinting; in this way he healed his sister. With his student Hjalmar August Schiøtz (1850-1927) he invented a Ophthalmometer that determines the curvature of the cornea and astigmatism could be detected. With his studies of eye movements during reading Javal was also a pioneer of eye tracking.

After the Franco-German War, where he served as a medical Major, Javal devoted himself beyond politics. He regularly wrote articles for major daily newspaper Le Temps. As an elected representative (1885-1889), he took special care of hygiene issues. He designed the Javal - law, the parents of seven or more children freed 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 of Alfred Dreyfus 1899.

Javal himself suffered for 21 years under Glaucoma, until he went blind at age 62. Yet he continued to write almost all his letters by hand, with the help of a him devised apparatus which automatically vorschob the paper at the end of each line. Crossings on a three-wheeled tandem he kept fit. Javal was in correspondence with many who were blind; from their and his own experience he wrote his book Entre Aveugles which contains advice for blinded. A German translation appeared in 1904 under the title " The blind man and his world".

His passion was Esperanto. The language, which he had supported since a long time, he turned from 1903 to itself. In 1905 and 1906 he took place at the first two World Esperanto Congresses in Boulogne -sur -Mer or Geneva. Creator of language Ludwig Zamenhof was in Paris with his guest. The Central Bureau was founded after the first World Congress of Esperanto ( Esperantista Centra Oficejo ) in Paris he supported financially and put it in his will a legacy.

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

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

Writings

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