You Have Bad Eyesight in the Year 1250. Now What?

You're a 45-year-old monk in the year 1250, and the letters on the page have started to swim. There are no glasses anywhere on Earth. So what do you do? In this video we follow Barnaby through 3,000 years of squinting, magic stones, Roman water bowls and a terrifying needle surgery, all the way to the invention of eyeglasses and Ben Franklin's bifocals. Illustrations and narration are AI-generated. Historical facts are checked against the sources below; legends and disputed stories are marked as such. #history #glasses #medievalhistory #historyofmedicine #theouchages