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[ 1 AND TMe rif
by LeoNARD KeeNe HiRSHBeR& a.b.,a.m.)m.d.,cjohns hopkins)
Everybody goes to the movies. Not only are Moving Picture theaters cheap, but the performances are as good, if not better, than you see in the two-dollar houses.
You have the pleasure, the music, the comfort, the entertainment and the instruction in a five-cent Moving Picture theater to a greater certainty than in many " legitimate houses."
The other day I saw James K. Hackett and a Frohman company for five cents in a four-reel photoplay. And again, you may see "Les Miserables," "Hamlet," "What Every Woman Knows ' ' and a thousand other instructive plays intermingled with zoology, outdoor scenery, humor and the like in a Motion Picture playhouse. These are better acted and in every way more satisfying than a great many similar productions which cost a theatrical management thousands of dollars weekly.
What harm is there, then, in visiting the movies ? Are the eyes injured ? Is the health of the patron destroyed ? Are the morals of the young corrupted by them?
The answer to all of these queries is an emphatic " No ! " Just as the ageold playhouse gradually eliminated all taint of vice from its performances; just as the editors of magazines understand— whatever their personal preferences might be — that the reading public will swallow but a small dose of the wicked, so the photoplay producers have learnt that their public will have none of the suggestive, the vicious nor the unpleasant.
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Militant prudes and belligerent moralists who read vice into tea-drinking and whose voices are for war against any pleasures whatsoever, who spit forth their crusading indignation against tobacco-smoking, Sunday walks, the stately minuet or the graceful Boston waltz, have already recognized the trend of the Moving Picture. They have, for the nonce, ceased to censor or to censure it.
Not so with certain amateur physiologists and opticians. This fold, who have not drunk too deeply of the Pierian spring, are convinced that defective vision, sties, granulated eyelids, eye-strain, pink-eye, inflamed lids, crossed eyes and the blind-staggers may each and all develop if you frequent the movies.
Be that as it may, you should feel of good cheer, for Dr. Herbert Harlan, perhaps the best ophthalmologist in the South, surgeon-general of Maryland, as well as envoy of the United States Public Health Service, sent to study trachoma — a dreadful eye malady— in the wilds of West Virginia, has definitely cast out the demons and bugaboos that the teachers of this folly would alarm us with.
Dr. Harlan, with whom I feel upon this matter in hearty concord, definitely asserts that the hour or so spent each day in the Moving Picture shows can result in no harm to the eyes. Really. I go even farther and assert that two hours a day in the dark auditorium of a picture playhouse, spent before the motion-photo screen, is actually a tonic to the tired eyes.