Aproximación a los problemas en la vista y el uso de anteojos en el burgos de mediados del XVIII

Abstract

In Burgos in the middle of the 18th Century, the property of «anteojos» was reduced to a small number of households. Only in the 5.7 % of the post-mortem inventories those oculars devices are mentioned, percentage that rose up to the 16.9 % at the home of clergymen and to the 10.3 % in the houses of the noble pensioners. The property of «anteojos» was in the Ancient Regime an exceptional event, a luxury product, and even exotic, although their modest prices, the real offer in the city shops and the net money kept in the houses of the city made them fairly affordable. However, and by contrast, the Catastro of Ensenada provides the knowledge of numerous cases of blindness and serious oculars dysfunctions, pathologies suffered, in most cases at the houses of spinners, extremely poor people, labourers, farmers and craftsmen, that is, the most illiterate and poorest socio-professional categories, living in the worst conditions, for whom no glasses have been found at all, not even modest ones, in their inventories post-mortem.