Cataract surgery: The origins

Surgery to restore vision lost to cataracts is one of the most common surgical procedures. It's also one of the oldest, dating back to the 5th century B.C. That’s when a Hindu surgeon named Sushruta described a procedure called couching, in which the cataractous lens is displaced with a sharp instrument so that it falls into the vitreous cavity, clearing the visual axis. In addition to India, cataract removal was recorded in ancient Greece and Babylonia, in 1st-century Europe, in Africa and in the Islamic world.

Many of the instruments and procedures used today in cataract surgery were pioneered in the 18th and 19th centuries.

●     The first modern cataract surgery to involve anesthesia took place in Paris in 1748, when Jacques Daviel pioneered a procedure that involved removing the inner contents of the lens and leaving the posterior lens capsule and the attached zonules that held it in place.

●     Samuel Sharp of London introduced the intracapsular procedure in 1753, in which the entire lens is removed through an incision by applying thumb pressure. 

●     The use of silk sutures for cataract surgery was first described by Henry Willard Williams of Boston in 1867.

Nowadays, according to the National Institutes of Health's National Eye Institute, more than half of all Americans either have a cataract or have had cataract surgery by age 80.

KARI