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The Hole in My Vision: An Artist's View of His Own Macular Degeneration

By Lee Allen
Penfield Press / University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, U.S.A., 2000.
117 pp., paper.
ISBN 1-57216-084-5.
Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens, 2022 X Avenue, Dysart , IA 52224-9767, U.S.A. E-mail: ballast@netins.net


Lee Allen is a 91-year-old Iowa-born painter who studied art in Provincetown, Massachusetts, with Charles Webster Hawthorne, in Mexico City with Diego Rivera, and was hired by Grant Wood in 1932 to create two WPA post office murals. His career direction changed dramatically in 1937 when he was offered a position as an ophthalmic illustrator at the University of Iowa. Over the next 45 years, he became not only a leading medical illustrator and photographer, but also did important work as an "ocularist" or maker of plastic prosthetic eyes. At age 78, two years after retiring from ophthalmology to return to painting, Allen noticed spots or holes in his own vision, called "scotomas," brought on by the atrophy of the "retinal pigment epithelium," the surface of the retina. This condition, known as age-related "macular degeneration" (AMD), is found in a third of the population by age 75 and has no way of being cured. Amazingly, he also discovered that he could see and make accurate drawings of the gaps in his vision. In this unusual, elegant book (typeset in large print, and illustrated by Allen's own full-color drawings), Allen and two of the doctors at the University of Iowa's Center for Macular Degeneration (H. Stanley Thompson and James C. Folk), document his achievements in art and medical science, and provide both a written and visual account of the progressive decline of his vision as he continues to age and to undergo laser treatments.

(Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review 16, No. 2, Winter 2000-2001.)

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Updated 4 May 2001.




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