The Hunterian lectures on colour-vision and colour-blindness

These lectures bring the early‑20th‑century science of sight to life, guiding listeners through the anatomy of the eye with the clarity of a seasoned professor. By likening the eye to a camera, the speaker explains how lenses, the iris, and the retina’s rods and cones turn light into visual signals, laying a foundation for anyone curious about how we actually “see” the world.

The second half of the presentation turns that groundwork toward colour‑blindness, challenging outdated labels like “red‑blind” and revealing why many sufferers still perceive colour, just not with the same nuance. Drawing on experiments, detailed illustrations, and practical testing methods, the lecturer unpacks the chemistry of visual pigments and the brain’s colour‑perceiving centres. Listeners will come away with a vivid understanding of both the normal mechanisms of colour vision and the varied ways they can falter, all presented in an engaging, historically rich narrative.