Evolution of ophthalmic practices thru different Cultures & Times

Evolution of ophthalmic practices thru different Cultures & TimeS

Long time ago in the ancient ages when there were no physicians; the patient was brought out in the market place and all passers-by had to confer with him to discover whether they have themselves been afflicted with the same disease or have seen others so afflicted and advise him to have recourse to the same treatment as that by which they escaped a similar disease, or as they have known to cure others. Medicine in general was probably in the hands of the priests of the healing divinity whilst surgery, as almost everywhere else in early medicine, was in the hands of a special class of skilled hand-workers and was considered as a handicraft. The priestly, non-operative practice was not regulated by law; but that the work of the surgeons was .The medicine of the priests was a mixture of superstition and ignorance; treatment consisted of incantations and also the administration of foul remedies - probably to disgust the demons causing the disease. It would appear that the practice of the surgeons was supervised by the priests. 
In ophthalmology the Egyptians knew such conditions as blepharitis, chalazion, ectropion, entropion, trichiasis, granulations, chemosis, pinguecula, pterygium, leucoma, staphyloma, iritis, cataract, hyphaema, inflammation, ophthalmoplegia and dacryocystitis. 
In Hindu medicine there is a suggestion, in the writings of Suçruta, of the earliest record of surgical treatment of cataract by couching. 
In Hebrew writings there are a textually obscure reference to improvement of a woman's appearance by having a golden eye. 
Early Greek medicine differed in no essentials from that of the rest of the ancient world. There was the same priest craft, the same temple worship and supernatural cures. It was only with the rise of the Asclepiadaæ, a group claiming descent from the God Aesculapius, but dissociating themselves from the priests of the temples, that Greek medicine began. One of these Asclepiads, Hippocrates the Second, also known as Hippocrates the Great, or simply as Hippocrates, born on the island of Cos, finally liberated medicine from the thrall of the supernatural. 
The doctors of Islam exhibited a high degree of proficiency and certainly were foremost in the treatment of eye diseases. Words such as retina and cataract are of Arabic origin. In ophthalmology and optics lbn al Haytham known to the West as Alhazen wrote the Optical Thesaurus from which such worthies as Roger Bacon, Leonardo da Vinci and Johannes Kepler drew theories for their own writings. In his Thesaurus he showed that light falls on the retina in the same manner as it falls on a surface in a darkened room through a small aperture, thus conclusively proving that vision happens when light rays pass from objects towards the eye and not from the eye towards the objects as thought by the Greeks. He presents experiments for testing the angles of incidence and reflection, and a theoretical proposal for magnifying lens (made in Italy three centuries later). He also taught that the image made on the retina is conveyed along the optic nerve to the brain. Razi was the first to recognize the reaction of the pupil to light and Ibn Sina was the first to describe the exact number of extrinsic muscles of the eyeball, namely six. The greatest contribution of Islamic medicine in practical ophthalmology was in the matter of cataract. The most significant development in the extraction of cataract was developed by Ammar bin Ali of Mosul, who introduced a hollow metallic needle through the sclerotic and extracted the lens by suction. Europe rediscovered this in the nineteenth century.