The Ice Box Archive Team is currently parsing through a collection of
Harper's Weekly magazines from 1860-1910. A turn of the century advertisement in Harper's Weekly boasts about this eye remedy.
The Ideal Sight Restorer
[advertisement pictured to the right] was "the inestimable blessing of sight. Nothing more
useful or
suitable for a
present."
The Museum of Vision in San Francisco, California, has in its collection the Ideal Sight Restorer and offers an interesting background into the device and its creator:
"Professor" Charles Tyrell invented the Ideal Sight Restorer. Tyrell was a masseur who obtained a medical degree at the age of 57 from the New York Eclectic Medical College. He had a private practice and two mail order concerns, one being The Ideal Company which manufactured his sight restoring device using suction to increase blood flow and reshape the cornea. On several occasions, the American Medical Association investigated the Ideal Sight Restorer and its inventor, "Professor" Charles A. Tyrell, proclaiming the device to be "pseudomedical claptrap." In 1915, the Ideal Company moved to England and renamed itself the Neu-Vita Hygenic Institute to avoid prosecution.
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Image and summary courtesy of Museum of Vision
The Ice Box Archive Team is currently parsing through a collection of Harper's Weekly magazines from 1860-1910. A turn of the century advertisement in Harper's Weekly boasts about this eye remedy. 
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