One hundred years ago today, a doctor said he’d changed his own eye color from brown to blue. Not with surgery, but with food. And when I started looking into who this guy was, it only got weirder.
This is Hidden Lens History. Every day I open the newspaper from exactly 100 years ago, find something worth sharing, and follow the story as far as I can.
It’s 1926, his name was J. D. Levine, and this wasn’t just one strange interview.
He was traveling around North America giving lectures on something called iridology. Basically, Levine thought he could look into your eye and tell what was wrong with you.
According to the article, blue eyes with a “silken finish” meant you were in perfect health. While all the other colors meant there was a problem.
Levine said that any other color was caused by toxins, inflammation, or congestion somewhere else in the body. He claimed that 90 percent of people with brown eyes were filled with toxins. And he said the color could change if you stopped eating certain foods.
He claimed that he had even done it himself. He said he came from what he called “brown-eyed stock,” but through changes in his diet, had turned them blue.
He had a working theory. A couple of months before this story, Levine was lecturing in Calgary, where one of the advertisements for it says, “Science’s Greatest Discovery: The Human Radio.”
Levine was billed as “America’s Leading Iriologist,” and the subject of the lecture was: “Human Vibrations — How to Detect Them.” Admission was free.
So what exactly was the human radio? Well, Levine believed that the eye functioned like a receiving station for the rest of the body. And the body was like a musical instrument. The way he explained it, everything inside your body was sending out vibrations. Your organs, your nerves, all of it. And somehow your eyes picked those signals up like a radio. Then the iris supposedly recorded what was happening as different colors, spots, or lines. If everything inside you is working properly, Levine said the iris would be smooth, and blue. If it wasn’t, the eye would show it.
He also believed that every child was born with blue or bluish eyes. Then, as problems developed, their eyes supposedly changed.
And apparently Levine had an answer for everything. Because at some point somebody must have asked: okay, then why are so many Irish people blue-eyed? Levine said it was because they were, “forced to live on a strict diet consisting frequently of nothing but potatoes and buttermilk.”
Sailors supposedly had blue eyes because they breathed pure oxygen in sea air. Mountain climbers apparently got a similar benefit from being at high altitude. And Levine wanted people to actually use this.
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In another talk, he told business owners that they should watch the eyes of their employees. That an employee’s eyes could reveal their physical condition, and their physical condition could tell you something about how efficiently they might work.
There was even a demonstration. During one newspaper interview a man entered the room who Levine said he’d never met before. Levine looked into his eyes, named three physical problems, and according to the reporter, the man said he was right.
If you’ve ever seen an Oz Pearlman act, you know this type of spontaneity can be staged. But you can also understand why a demonstration like this would be very convincing, staged or not.
Levine wasn’t operating completely on the fringes here. He was the editor of a Chicago publication called The Health Messenger.
I found Levine promoting himself still more than a decade later. So I wondered: did iridology just disappear? Nope. People are still practicing it.
The difference is that eventually researchers tested whether someone could determine diseases by looking into their iris. Spoiler alert, it did not hold up. Not under controlled studies anyway. In those studies, Doctors couldn’t diagnose disease from the iris any more than by chance.
And eye color itself does not work the way Levine described it. Brown eyes aren’t brown because toxins accumulate in your body. And changing your diet doesn’t normally change the colors of your eyes. Eye color is mostly about genetics and pigmentation. Brown eyes have more melanin in the iris, not because of toxins.
But the part that interests me most isn’t simply that Levine was wrong. It’s how convincing the whole thing sounded before you tested it. Even to him maybe. I don’t know if Levine knew he was selling nonsense. I don’t know if he believed every word of it. And after spending way more time with this guy than I expected today, I’m not sure which possibility I find more interesting.
Because he had a convincing explanation. He had demonstrations. And he also had the best sales pitch of all.
Look at me. I did it myself.
I did not wake up this morning planning to learn anything about iridology. I stopped because a hundred-year-old newspaper said some guy had changed his eyes from brown to blue with food.
And, unfortunately for me, and you, I needed to know more.
See you tomorrow - Chris