Ophthalmology · a Light

An Iraqi oculist drew a cataract out through a needle

Eye disease was the commonest serious illness across the region, and it produced a specialist, the kahhal, with a literature of his own. Hunayn ibn Ishaq's Ten Treatises on the Eye, from the ninth century, carries what are thought to be the earliest anatomical diagrams of the eye, though the surviving copies are later than the author. Around 1010 Ammar ibn Ali al-Mawsili described removing a soft cataract by suction through a hollow metal needle and named the patients he had done it on. Ali ibn Isa's notebook for oculists, from Baghdad, worked through more than a hundred conditions and was translated into Latin and used for centuries. Pushing the clouded lens aside with a needle was old, Indian and Greek before them. The refinement and the record keeping were theirs.

Ammar al-Mawsili and Ali ibn Isa · c. 1000 CE