The History of Ophthalmology in Berlin before 1810

Henning A.,
Julius-Hirschberg-Gesellschaft (Berlin)

In 1498 the first oculist is documented in Berlin: Master Hermann at service to the elector Johann (Cicero) of Brandenburg. He belonged to the growing number since 1412 of medical men in ordinary to the house of Hohenzollern in Brandenburg. In 1510 at Berlin a Jew Moses was not condemned to death unlike to 37 of his brothers in faith because of an alleged sacrilege, for he knew ophthalmiatrics. At Königsberg Johann Dietrich Schertling is documented as court oculist in 1667 and Joseph Viviani in 1696, Schertling also at service to the Moscowian tsar’s court in 1676. From 1698 to 1725 Johann Andreas Eisenbarth has visited Berlin five times, he did also couch cataracts. Since 1715 the Huguenot Jean Blanc practised as settled oculist at Berlin Unter den Linden until 1741. From 1750 to 1769 the travelling oculist Joseph Hillmer from Hainburg in Austria resided in Berlin – in 1748 he was appointed by Frederick II professor for eye-diseases –, from 1753 to 1786 Valentin Andreas Köhring and from 1758 to 1788 the court oculist Christian Gottlieb Cyrus. In 1750 Frederick II had expelled John Taylor, suspecting the oculist to be an English spy. When Hillmer had been expelled from Russia in 1751 for charlatanism, the Prussian king ordered in 1753 the military surgeon Jacques Taverne to be trained ophthalmologically at Paris. In 1755 Taverne as first in Berlin extracted cataracts according to Daviel’s extracapsular extraction. In 1772 Johann Baptist Wenzel returning from Russia practised at Berlin, between 1779 and 1785 several times the Saxonian court oculist Giovanni Virgilio Casaamata, who in 1782 founded the first German eye-clinic at Dresden, in 1781 François and Denis Pellier after their visit to Russia, in 1790 Joseph de Raineri, the later oculist in ordinary to the Russian tsar Paul I, at last in 1791 Karl Ludwig Seiffert. According to the handbook on practical surgery, edited in 1763 by Simon Pallas for his students, this professor in ordinary still taught the traditional couching the cataract at the Berlin Collegium Medico-chirurgicum. His successor in 1769, Joachim Friedrich Henckel, recommended and applied the „Boutonnière“, the depression of the opaque kernel of the lens, delivered through the posterior capsule, which he had learned as military surgeon in 1738/39 by Antoine Ferrein in Paris. Since 1787 the surgeon in ordinary at the Collegium Medico-chirurgicum Christian Ludwig Mursinna preferred Daviel’s cataractextraction. When in 1810 Carl Ferdinand von Graefe had got the chair for surgery and ophthalmology at the new Berlin Friedrich Wilhelm’s university, Mursinna held the chair at the „Pepinière“, founded in 1795 for military physicians, until his death in 1825.

Copyright © Deutsche Ophthalmologische Gesellschaft, 2002. All rights reserved.

Last updated: 

Webdesign: SPALLEK.COM