Richard Zegers is an ophthalmologist at the Maastricht Eye Clinic, with a special ‘area of interest’: he conducts research into ophthalmological topics and facts from the past. From famous people such as Laurel and Hardy to eye experiments in Auschwitz concentration camp. Zegers talks about this hobby that got out of hand.
At the beginning of this century, Zegers would do PhD research into glaucoma. But eventually he ended up on another topic. “I had once read somewhere that composer Bach had had surgery on his eyes. I found out that this had never been written about by an ophthalmologist. I looked into it and decided to write everything down and send it to a scientific journal. It was fun to do and an additional advantage of this research was that I could largely do it from home. I had just become a father, so it practically worked out well that I could be at home more. I only had to go to a library, archive or museum every now and then.”
Lots of publicity
A subsequent investigation was into Mozart’s cause of death. He was able to formulate a new hypothesis, namely that Mozart died of a kidney infection as a complication of a streptococcal throat infection. That was a common occurrence at the time. And as for Mozart’s eyes: portraits show that they bulge slightly. This may be a result of a smallpox infection that Mozart contracted when he was eleven. And his father wrote about mild myopia in one of his letters.
Bach was also nearsighted, Zegers thinks. “And he probably had cataracts. Bach was operated on twice in his last year of life by an Englishman named John Taylor. This was treated with a so-called ‘cataract stitch’ in which the lens was pressed down with a needle without anesthesia. This often led to serious and painful complications. Four months later Bach died.”
Ultimately, the findings about the two composers formed Zegers’ thesis. His studies generated a lot of publicity, including in the New York Times and the television program De Wereld Draait Door. “That attention surprised me. I even felt a little guilty, because fellow ophthalmologists research much more relevant topics and do not make the news. But apparently there is a need for these types of medical historical topics.”
Unearthing Bach
The research into Bach could have been even more extensive. Bach is buried in the Thomaskirche in Leipzig and Zegers wanted to examine the composer’s remains. He thought, and still thinks, that those remains there are not Bach’s. The original grave was unmarked and for several years after the interment no one knew the exact location. “Almost 150 years later, a search was made using vague clues and a coffin containing the remains of a 65-year-old man was found. We can only determine whether that is really Bach through DNA research. That is possible, because the whereabouts of his son Carl Philipp Emanuel are known with certainty. I had developed a whole plan to recover the remains in Leipzig, with an undertaker, a mobile CT scan and a DNA expert. But the church council didn’t want it. The grave is now an attraction. Naturally, people did not want to run the risk of it disappearing.”
Laurel and Hardy
Zegers did his most cherished research with his then 12-year-old daughter. Together they watched 92 films by the former comedy duo Laurel and Hardy. In the films, their eyes were often hit by flying objects, branches and the famous eyepoke with the index finger. “Every time something like this happened, we counted it. We published this research in the medical scientific journal Scottish Medical Journal. My daughter, as young as she was, seriously contributed to this. So it has really become a joint publication. Laurel and Hardy were quite rude to each other in the films. In real life they would certainly have suffered eye damage and Hardy would almost certainly have gone blind.”
Zegers also spent several years researching a gruesome medical experiment in Auschwitz during the Second World War. Camp doctor Josef Mengele and biologist Karin Magnussen experimented there with changing the eye color of prisoners. Zegers studied the archives of the German journalist and war writer Ernst Klee and visited Auschwitz to look through laboratory requests from the war. At the beginning of 2020, he was the first ophthalmologist to publish an article in Israel Medical Association Journal on this relatively unknown subject.
Find out for yourself
Zegers does not have a concrete goal with his historical studies. He does it as a hobby out of curiosity. “Sometimes I read statements somewhere and I think: is that really true? Then I try to figure things out myself by finding the original sources. And by writing that down for a scientific journal, I can test the results against the opinions of others. This way I learn even more about a subject. But I don’t think that knowledge is still relevant to the current practice of ophthalmology. Most topics are too long ago for that. But experiments such as those in Auschwitz could easily happen again. Unfortunately, we generally learn little from history.”
Zegers also mentions a nice side effect of his research and the media attention for it: ophthalmology receives extra attention. “My profession, and science in general, reaches people who normally have little contact with it. Hopefully, for example, people will get the message that eyes are vulnerable and that you should take good care of them.”
Daylight saving time
Zegers is also interested in contemporary questions. For example, whether or not patients like to see an ophthalmologist in a white coat and why. He also investigated whether the start of summer time leads to more complications during procedures by ophthalmologists. “Maybe by sleeping less you are less fit in the morning, which may have an influence on operations. Then we could decide, for example, to start operations an hour later for a few weeks when daylight saving time starts. But I found no influence of daylight saving time on the number of complications. So that’s good to know, both for ophthalmologists and patients.”
2023-11-03 08:59:29
#historical #studies #hand #hobby #MedNet
