Original in Spanish: Operaciones de cataratas a través de la historia
I was talking with F. about how cataract surgery nowadays takes less than half an hour. It’s a pim-pam-poom, out. These days it takes me longer to shave my legs than it takes a surgeon to swap a grandpa’s crystalline lens.
Then I remembered that in the Middle Ages people were already getting cataracts removed. I pull the thread and up comes a guy called Ammar al-Mawsili who lived in Egypt around the 11th century. Turns out the man invented, and successfully used, a “syringe” that was a glass tube with which he suctioned out the lens. I’ll also say this guy probably never smelled impostor syndrome in his whole damn life, since he chose a clickbait title for his book, “The Book of Choice in Ophthalmology”, where he said things like:
“Then I constructed the hollow needle, but I did not operate with it on anybody at all, before I came to Tiberias. There came a man for an operation who told me: Do as you like with me, only I cannot lie on my back. Then I operated on him with the hollow needle and extracted the cataract; and he saw immediately and did not need to lie, but slept as he liked. Only I bandaged his eye for seven days. With this needle nobody preceded me. I have done many operations with it in Egypt”
Take a second to let this sink in: our friend Ammar sucked out crystalline lenses with a glass straw and that was the option for the lucky ones.
Much earlier, around 600 BC, a certain Sushruta in India managed with an awl.
And then, oh surprise, I learn that cataract operations were so frequent they were already regulated in the Code of Hammurabi, from 1700 BC. Careful now, sharp curves ahead: curing a nobleman’s cataract earned you about 80 g of silver, but if the nobleman lost the eye they cut off a hand (the healer’s, not the nobleman’s). If the patient was a slave the fee was lower, 16 g, but if things went wrong you had to pay the owner half a slave for having broken his.
The past was rubbish, truly.
(Facebook, 2022-03-17)