Oculist

Benjamin Gibson, a Newcastle-born surgeon, trained in Lancaster, Chester, London and Edinburgh before being appointed as assistant to Charles White, Manchester surgeon and man-midwife. He developed expertise in eye diseases, particularly of children. In 1804 he was appointed Honorary Surgeon to the Manchester Infirmary. He died young in 1812, but had published significantly on the cause of ophthalmia neonatorum, on cataract surgery in infants (the first to do so) and on surgery to reform damaged pupils. He was the first specialist oculist in Manchester and the North of England, and the first in that region to perform cataract extraction...

PURPOSE: To describe the entry of cataract surgery into the British Isles. METHODS: Handbills, books, and other historical sources were reviewed to determine when cataract surgery was first performed in the region. RESULTS: Roman artifacts suggest that couching was performed in the British Isles in antiquity. Seemingly miraculous cures of blindness during the early Middle Ages might be consistent with couching. However, there is no strong evidence of medieval cataract surgery in the region...

AIM: The aim of this study was to provide representative results on gender-specific utilization of outpatient medical and preventive care in a peripheral rural area. METHODS: 1,246 adult inhabitants were interviewed in the Rural Health Study 2008. Answers to the utilization of outpatient care and behavioral health preventive programs were analyzed by bivariate analyses and by multiple regression analyses. RESULTS: Bivariate analyses show gender-specific differences in the utilization of the services of not only urologists and gynecologists but also of general practitioners, dentists, oculists, radiologists and preventive programs for weight reduction, healthy nutrition, back gymnastics and stress handling...

AIM: To evaluate the knowledge, attitudes, and practices regarding eye-care seeking practices of visually impaired adults in a rural area Yueqing, and explore factors influencing their behavior. METHODS: A stratified sampling method was used to select 48 villages in Yueqing, from which 2400 people were selected to receive vision screenings conducted by oculists during a household visit. Those presenting visual acuity ≥0.5 logMAR in either eye completed a self-designed questionnaire investigating their knowledge about medical eye-care seeking, attitudes about eye health and eye-care-seeking behavior...

PURPOSE: Our aim was to summarize key aspects of the pathomechanism and the ocular involvements of rheumatic and systemic autoimmune diseases. METHODS: Apart from a paper in French (Morax V, Ann Oculist 109:368-370, 1893), all papers referred to in this article were published in English. All the materials were peer-reviewed full-text papers, letters, reviews, or book chapters obtained through a literature search of the PubMed database using the keywords ocular manifestations; pathogenesis; systemic inflammatory rheumatic diseases; rheumatoid arthritis; osteoarthritis; fibromyalgia; systemic lupus erythematosus; seronegative spondyloarthritis; ankylosing spondylitis; reactive arthritis; enteropathic arthritis; psoriatic arthritis; systemic sclerosis; polymyalgia rheumatica and covering all years available...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Strabismus was a known eye misalignment since the Hippocratic era (ca 5th century BC). Hippocrates and his followers were the first to introduce the hypothesis of a hereditary condition. Many ancient Greek physicians like Galen (ca 2nd AD) provided several definitions, while Paul of Aegina (625-690 AD) was the scholar who introduced a method to treat it. Paul used a full face mask and an oil lamb to guide the eyeballs toward the desired direction. It seems that this approach endured for centuries to come. During 11th century AD in Constantinople, the Byzantine scholar and politician Michael Constantine Psellus (ca 1020-1105 AD) composed a series of philosophical, religious, political and scientific treatises...

INTRODUCTION: Maxillary sinus mucocele is an unusual clinic entity (incidence of 3-10%), represented by mucous secretion lined by respiratory stratified pavemented epithelium and its origin is mainly secondary to infections, inflammations, surgery, trauma or neoplasia. CASE REPORT: We present a case of maxillary sinus mucocele. Subject of the study is a 74 aged patient referring positive anamnesis for nasal cavity surgery. His symptoms appeared six months ago and he complainted vertical ocular diplopia and ocular tension sensation, without rhinologic complaints...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

INTRODUCTION: John Thomas Woolhouse (1666-1733/1734), who practiced in Paris, was part of a family with 5 generations of English oculists. Some historians have derided him as a "charlatan" and have criticized him for adhering to the old notion that a cataract was a membrane anterior to the lens. METHODS: We reviewed treatises and digital records related to Woolhouse and his family and the handwritten notes of his 1721 lecture series at the Royal Society of Medicine...

English surgeon John Taylor attempted to perform strabismus surgery in the 18th century. The field languished until, in Germany, treatment of strabismus by cutting an extraocular muscle was proposed by Louis Stromeyer in 1838 and performed by Johann Friedrich Dieffenbach in 1839. According to traditional teaching, there has never been any proof that anyone in the United States thought of the idea of strabismus surgery before Stromeyer's report. In 1841, American surgeon William Gibson wrote that he had cut extraocular muscles to treat strabismus several times beginning in 1818 but never published his cases...

Neuromyelitis optica (NMO, Devic's disease) is an autoimmune disorder of the CNS that mainly affects the optic nerves and spinal cord and, if not treated, can leave patients blind and wheelchair-bound. NMO was long considered a clinical variant of multiple sclerosis (MS). While the history of MS has been studied extensively, relatively little is known about the early history of NMO. A dissertation written by Fernand Gault (1873-1936), a doctoral student to Eugène Devic (1858-1930), a Lyon-based neurologist after whom the disease would later be named, is considered by many the first review of NMO...

We now know that cataract couching involves depressing an occluded crystalline lens to the bottom of the vitreous chamber, but from the time of Galen until the seventeenth-century cataracts were thought to be separate concretions arising between the crystalline lens and the pupil. From Antiquity through the Renaissance, the combination of visual theory in which the crystalline humor is the author of vision, and surgical experience—that couching cataracts restored some degree of sight—resulted in anatomists depicting a large space between the crystalline lens and the pupil...

Stomatognathic system is strictly correlated to other anatomical regions; many studies investigated relationship between temporomandibular joint and posture, several articles describe cranio-facial pain from dental causes, such as trigger points. Until now less interest has been given to connections between dental occlusion and ophthalmology, even if they are important and involving. Clinical experience in dental practice claims that mandibular latero-deviation is connected both to eye dominance and to defects of ocular convergence...

Craniosynostosis(CS), the premature fusion of cranial sutures leading to an abnormal shape and precocious maturity of skull, is classified into Non-syndromic Craniosynostosis (NSC) and Syndromic Craniosynostoses(SC).NCS only has different abnormality of skull according to which cranial suture is involved while extra malformation of midface and limbs present in SCS. Common SCS contains Crouzon Syndrome, Apert Syndrome, Pfeiffer Sydrome, and etc. The clinical manifestation of CS includes malformation of skull, intracranial hypertension, brain hernia, developmental disorder of cerebral function, strabismus, and etc, while SCS has more complex manifestation...

We strove to identify the earliest cataract surgeons in Latin America. Probably by 1611, the Genovese oculist Francisco Drago was couching cataracts in Mexico City. The surgeon Melchor Vásquez de Valenzuela probably performed cataract couching in Lima by 1697. Juan Peré of France demonstrated cataract couching in Veracruz and Mexico City between 1779 and 1784. Juan Ablanedo of Spain performed couching in Veracruz in 1791. Cataract extraction might have been performed in Havana and Caracas by 1793 and in Mexico by 1797...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Diagnosis and treatment of facial pain is a problem for physicians of different specialties (neurologists, dentists, surgeons, oculists, otolaryngologists and psychiatrists). A classification of this pathology is far from ideal and an interdisciplinary comprehensive approach is needed. Current approaches to etiotropic, symptomatic and pathogenetic treatment of patients with most frequent variants of orofacial pain are presented.

Ninety years ago, the first issue of the Postgraduate Medical Journal published a review of an article written by Mr Robert Lindsay-Rea, a consultant ophthalmic surgeon in the Western Ophthalmic Hospital and an oculist in the West End Hospital for Nervous Diseases, entitled "A preliminary report on the treatment of keratitis". Today, microbial keratitis remains an important cause of avoidable visual impairment in the world. The aetiology of microbial keratitis has changed greatly over the past century due to the discovery of antibiotics, improvement in sanitation and education, the rising trend of contact lens wear and increased air travel...

OBJECTIVE: To investigate the status of eye disease prevention resources in community health service centers, to understand the distribution of ophthalmology service resources in each community, and to understand the main problems existing in the work of blindness prevention and treatment in Shanghai, so as to strengthen the prevention of blindness and improve the primary eye care level. METHODS: Using the survey method, we carried out the investigation of disease control and prevention resources in all community health service centers to obtain the data of eye disease prevention and treatment resources...