But his radical new view was also an unpopular one. He was already known by his colleagues as a brilliant man - a surgeon - who had discovered the properties of adrenalin, and pioneered an ear operation for deafness that is still in use today. This was clearly a man who could push the edge of knowledge and was not afraid to discover, but in spite of the respect he had earned, his new direction for the care of vision was too much.

The latter part of his life until his death in 1931 was punctuated by episodes of conflict between himself and his former colleagues and many attempts were made to discredit him - near the end of his life he was due to appear in court but his death curtailed the event.

Over the years nothing had diminished his conviction that a revolutionary change was needed in understanding of how vision, the mind and the whole person works. His detractors were unable to stop him: Bates was a fully trained medical man and knew all the arguments against his new model inside out.

The people who followed in Bates' footsteps have come to his method from a different route. A new model of vision required a new approach, and almost all practitioners of the Method are rarely medical people. They are educators.

While the cases were won, the crushing pressure took a serious toll on the structure of the community of Bates teachers. Margaret Corbett herself had trained many teachers and after this experience she advised them: don't advertise, don't stick your neck out. It's just not worth it.

The years that have followed until the present day have been characterised by fragmentation and disconnection. Organised bodies for the Bates Method have remained small and tucked away. In some areas of the world the misrepresentation of the method has continued - even in recent times some excellent teachers have been hounded by the authorities and made to move or cease practising.

With the invention of the Internet a global community is starting to form and the network of teachers that has been so long in disarray is finally starting to become cohesive.

We're proud at Seeing.org and Bates Method International to be the forerunners of the Bates Method on the Internet. The method works in so many ways to the benefit of people with eyesight problems. In contrast to conventional eyesight care, its educative approach shows people how to apply healthy vision habits, rather than stumbling on with the same habits that got them into a visual difficulty in the first place.

We think it makes sense that eyes need no artificial aids to seeing. Humans are undoubtedly ingenious, but instead of devising ever more complicated ways of bypassing nature, let's use that brilliance to discover what nature provided in the first place.

Welcome to Seeing!