Samuel Gross (1805-1884), a great American teacher of surgery, was the author of the well-known System of Surgery.
Ophthalmic Surgeons.
J. A. H. Reimarus (1729-1814), of Hamburg, first employed belladonna in ophthalmic surgery.
Joseph Barth (1745-1818), of Malta, founded an ophthalmic hospital, and first lectured on eye diseases and their treatment.
Jung-Stilling (1740-1817) was a celebrated coucher of cataracts.
Dr. Thomas Young (1773-1829) rendered great services to optical science, and was the first to describe astigmatism, or the want of symmetry in the anterior refracting surfaces of the eyeball—a disorder of vision which has considerable influence in causing headache.
J. A. Schmidt (1759-1809) first described syphilitic iritis; he called eye disease with great justice “the elegant diminishing mirror of diseases of the body.”
C. Himly (1772-1837) used mydriatics (dilators of the pupil, such as hyoscyamus and belladonna) in operations on the eye. Atropine afterwards superseded these.
G. J. Beer (1763-1821), a professor of Vienna, founded the famous teaching of the Vienna school of ophthalmology, and greatly improved the practice of the art and the instruments employed in it.
H. L. Helmholtz (born 1821) invented that powerful aid to the ophthalmic surgeon—the ophthalmoscope—in 1851. It is said that the observation of the reddening of the pupil in a drowning cat first suggested the invention to Méry in 1704. Helmholtz’s invention made scientific ophthalmology possible. This branch of surgery may be said to date from this great discovery.