Ophthalmology is the branch of medicine that analyzes the eye and its diseases (as opposed to the mainstream, an exclusively physiological approach to vision problems, Aldous Huxley in ‘The art of seeing’, published in 1942, raises the appropriate which would be to take into account another essential factor: the mind). Ophthalmology is closely related to optics, that part of physics dedicated to studying the laws and phenomena of light. Roger Bacon (1219-1292) is credited with inventing the first glasses to improve eyestrain. Umberto Eco in ‘The Name of the Rose’details the shape of those used by the monk Guillermo de Baskerville: «It was a hairpin, so constructed that it could be mounted on a man’s nose like the rider on his horse’s back or like the bird on his ledge. And, on both sides, the fork continued in two oval metal rings that, located in front of each eye, were set with two glass almonds, as thick as the bottom of a glass». We will have to wait until the fifties for the first plastic contact lenses to appear, the popular contact lenses, which made it possible to dispense with glasses derived from the gadget described by the Italian writer.
Sticking to the West, during the Middle Ages at the Salerno School of Medicine, puncture was practiced for cataract surgery. In 1745, the French oculist Jacques Daviel performed the first cataract operation by extracting the crystalline lens with tweezers, a technique that gave way to modern ophthalmological surgery and put an end to the habitual practice until then of puncture. In 1851 the German physiologist Hermann Helmholtz discovers the ophthalmoscope, which allows examining the retina at the bottom of the eye. In 1906 the Austrian ophthalmologist Eduard Konrad Zirm performed the first successful cornea transplant operation. In 1916 Ignacio Barraquer tested a new technique in the surgical extraction of the cataract, substituting the forceps for a suction cup. In New York, in 1944, the first eye bank was created. In 1983, the Belgian Claude Veraart created electronic ‘glasses’ for the blind that emit ultrasound that reflects objects and are recognized by the blind. In the last fifteen years, laser refractory surgery and intraocular lenses (IOL) have arrived in cataract operations.
In the pages of the Tribune of the Diario de León on June 18, 2012, the writer Jose Luis Gavilanes reported his request to the León City Council to dedicate a street to Enrique Salgado Gomez (1926-1997), whom he defined as a prominent ophthalmologist and humanist. A commitment in which Gavilanes has not ceased since then. In the brief profile that he made of him, he highlighted his contribution to the discovery of microcirculation in the conjunctiva that made it possible to detect vascular and cardiac diseases. Author of some novels and essays, he directed a magazine, ‘Myopia’, now defunct. His father, also an eye doctor, was advertised on the last page of the Diario de León on July 14, 1931, next to a news item about the proclamation of the Catalan State that Macià would preside over. And at the University of Barcelona it will be precisely where Enrique Salgado Gómez will specialize in ophthalmology and surgery, and in Barcelona where he will practice his profession and where he will finally die. The unusual capricious games of chance.
