Ophthalmology

Ophthalmology (/ˌɒfθɑːlˈmɑːlədʒi/ or /ˌɒpθɑːlˈmɒlədʒi/) is the branch of medicine that deals with the anatomy, physiology and diseases of the eye. An ophthalmologist is a specialist in medical and surgical eye problems. Since ophthalmologists perform operations on eyes, they are both surgical and medical specialists. A multitude of diseases and conditions can be diagnosed from the eye.

Etymology

The word ophthalmology comes from the Greek roots ὀφθαλμός, ophthalmos, i.e., "eye" and -λoγία, -logia, i.e., "study of, discourse"; ophthalmology literally means "the science of eyes". As a discipline, it applies to animal eyes also, since the differences from human practice are surprisingly minor and are related mainly to differences in anatomy or prevalence, not differences in disease processes.

History

Ancient India

The Indian surgeon Sushruta wrote Sushruta Samhita in Sanskrit in about 800 BC which describes 76 ocular diseases (of these 51 surgical) as well as several ophthalmological surgical instruments and techniques. His description of cataract surgery was more akin to extracapsular lens extraction than to couching. He has been described as the first cataract surgeon.

Copiale cipher

The Copiale cipher is an encrypted manuscript consisting of 75,000 handwritten characters filling 105 pages in a bound volume. Originally thought to date between 1760 and 1780, it was later found to date from the 1730s. It was first examined at the German Academy of Sciences at Berlin in the 1970s but did not come to public attention until 2011 when an international team announced that they had deciphered it. In April 2011, it was decoded with the help of modern computer techniques by Kevin Knight of the University of Southern California, along with Beáta Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer of Uppsala University in Sweden. They found it to be a German text encrypted by a homophonic cipher, a complex substitution code.

The manuscript includes abstract symbols, as well as letters from Greek and most of the Roman alphabet. The only plain text in the book is "Copiales 3" at the end and "Philipp 1866" on the flyleaf. Philipp is thought to have been an owner of the manuscript. The plain-text letters of the message were found to be encoded by accented Roman letters, Greek letters and symbols, with unaccented Roman letters serving only to represent spaces.