“They eventually landed in Trieste, and there for the next decade or so, he worked as a language teacher and completed Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. With the publication of Portrait, in 1916, he acquired rich patrons, but until then—that is, throughout his children’s early years—the Joyces were very poor. Some days they went without dinner. Their first child, Giorgio, was born in 1905, a bonny, easy baby, and furthermore, a boy. Nora adored him until the day she died. Two years after Giorgio came Lucia, a sickly, difficult child, and a girl, with strabismus—that is, she was cross-eyed. Nora, too, had strabismus, but hers was far less noticeable.” Acocella, J. Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints. New York: Pantheon Books; 2007:4.

The case against cigarette smoking and its effect on age-related macular degeneration (AMD) continues to be built. In the EUREYE study of nearly 5 000 patients from seven study centres across Europe investigators estimated that the attributable fraction of AMD related to smoking was 27%. Most alarmingly they found that compared with people with unilateral macular degeneration those with bilateral were much more likely to have a history of heavy smoking in the previous 25 years. The need for public …