80 Chapter 2

of the retina to the optic nerve, the difference between the aque-
Vignette 2.1 ous and vitreous chambers, and the existence of oculorotary mus-
cles (although he assumed that humans also have a retractor bulbi
The Medieval Eye muscle like that of some other animals). It is also clear that Galen
viewed the lens as the seat of vision.
The first illustration of Galen’s ideas, or at least the first we
S routinely searched for manuscripts toofbeAlexandria,
HIPS THAT DOCKED IN THE ANCIENT CITY Egypt, were
copied or confiscated know of, was done by an Arab physician, Hunain ibn Ishak, in the
as additions to the Alexandrian library, which was meant to contain latter part of the ninth century A.D. This representation of the eye
every book ever written. This goal was probably never achieved, but (Figure 1) is highly symbolic, but some of the key structural features
the library’s collection has been estimated at almost a million pa- of the eye are present and consistent with Galen’s descriptions. The
pyrus scrolls (books in those days), and many of them were the sole eye has three major coats—the sclera and cornea, the choroid, and
copy. The final demise of the library of Alexandria around A.D. 500 the retina in our terms—with a thin outer layer that could corre-
was a loss of incalculable magnitude; our intellectual heritage was spond to the episclera and Tenon’s capsule (see Chapter 3). The
decimated. drawing includes a lens, the fluid-filled aqueous and vitreous cham-
Part of the loss may have been The Book of the Eye, a text writ- bers, a pupil, and an optic nerve. But while the major elements are
ten by Herophilus (circa 335–circa 280 B.C.), who was regarded as present, their sizes, shapes, and positions differ from our modern
the greatest of the Greek anatomists. Its existence is inferred from version. The optic nerve, for example, exits at the posterior pole
other writings that survived. From other authors who seem to have and runs straight back from the eye, instead of running medially, and
seen such a book, we know that Herophilus understood and de- the lens is depicted as a sphere located in the center of the eye.
scribed the anatomy of the eye in some detail and that he discov- And just in front of the lens is a structure with no anatomical coun-
ered and described the nerves of the eye, among other things. terpart; it represents the visual spirit and reveals the drawing’s
Some contemporary scholars believe that Herophilus used illustra- Greek inspiration.
tions in his book, which makes its loss all the greater; they would Vision was the most difficult sense for the ancients to under-
have been the first known anatomical illustrations of the eye. More stand. While the wind on one’s face offered clues to the nature of
important still, Herophilus would have been writing about things he sound and its medium of transmission over long distances, there
had observed; he dissected the human body and was one of the last were no comparable hints about light. What it was, how it was
to do so for nearly 15 centuries. (The possibility, hotly debated, transmitted, and how it might interact with the eye were mysteries
that Herophilus sometimes practiced human vivisection is too ap- about which one could only try to deduce solutions. Plato and his
palling to contemplate for long.) followers, who influenced Galen, treated vision as a sense analogous
Much of what we know about the work of Herophilus and
other Greek anatomists comes from the writings of Galen (A.D.
129–circa 199), who was the principal inheritor and exponent of the
knowledge acquired by the Greek philosophers. (All fields of intellec-
tual inquiry, including what we now call science, were philosophy as
far as the ancients were concerned.) Galen was extremely well edu-
cated, widely read in the classical literature, extensively traveled, and
the dominant figure in anatomy and medicine until the Renaissance.
His enormous influence came from his erudition, his strongly held
opinions, his skill as a polemicist, and the enormous volume of his
writings (then, and later, he was referred to as a “windbag”).
Because human dissection was not permitted in Galen’s time,
his detailed descriptions of ocular dissections refer primarily to
bovine and simian eyes. He was thoroughly familiar with the work
of Herophilus, however, and whatever preconceptions Galen had
about the structure of the human eye probably derived from this
source. In any event, he was certainly influenced by the earlier
Greek writers on vision and the function of the eye, and it was
their ideas about vision, expressed in Galen’s words, that was to in-
fluence thinking about the eye for almost a millennium. (Vignette
3.2 has more to say about Galen’s influence.) Figure 1
If we did not have some idea about the structure of the eye, it The Human Eye a Thousand Years Ago
would be difficult to reconstruct from Galen’s description; there are A cross section through the eye is shown framed by the aperture of
no pictures, the meanings of words are obscure, and translators do the lids as viewed from the front. Note the central, spherical lens, the
not always agree about Galen’s terminology, as they point out in hollow optic nerve that is continuous with the vitreous chamber, and
extensive footnotes. But some essential features are clear: Galen the structure representing the “visual spirit” just in front of the lens.
understood the three-layered structure of the eye, the relationship (From Polyak 1941.)
 Ocular Geometry and Topography 81

to touch; it was as if rigid, invisible rays of a vital spirit emanated of the optic chiasm is also unprecedented.) Alhazen’s depiction of
from the eye and vibrated when they encountered an external ob- the optic nerve within the eye is incorrect, but it is consistent with
ject. (Plato’s student Aristotle disagreed and believed that light, the prevailing view of the optic nerve as the sensory element of the
whatever it was, came from objects to the eye.) They believed that eye. Because of its obvious blood vessels, the retina was thought to
the vibrations were concentrated by the lens—hence its central lo- be mainly nutritive in function (Galen again).
cation—and transmitted to the brain by fluid in the eye and the In the late medieval period, Alhazen’s work was translated into
optic nerve. Thus, the visual spirit in this drawing is the source of Latin and became the basis of several thirteenth-century treatises
the emanating rays through which the eye sensed the environment. on optics, including the Opus Majus of Roger Bacon (circa 1220–
The drawing in Figure 2 was done a century later, around A.D. 1292), the Perspectiva Communis of John Pecham (circa 1230–1292),
1000, and it marks an immense change in thinking about the eye; and the Perspectiva of Witelo (or Vitellio; circa 1230 or 1235–after
there is no longer any representation of a visual spirit. This drawing 1275), all of which included diagrams dealing with the optics of the
was done by the great mathematician Ibn Al-Haytham (965–1039), eye. The importance of these works is not that they added much
generally known by the Latin version of his name, Alhazen. Like new, but that they were excellent syntheses and brought optical
Euclid before him, Alhazen had a geometer’s love for optics, and his knowledge to a much wider audience. Bacon and Pecham hedged
investigations convinced him that rays of light enter the eye from on Alhazen’s dismissal of the visual spirit, but Witelo adopted
external objects, not the other way around. (Alhazen neither knew Alhazen’s position unreservedly, and this was the view that was to
nor cared about the nature of light, which made much of the influence the scholars who made the next major advances. But
philosophers’ considerations irrelevant.) By eliminating the visual those advances had to await the Renaissance.
spirit, Alhazen demysticized the eye, making its operation subject to
the same optical principles as any glass lens. Where the eye was
once a matter of wonder and speculation, he made the eye an ob-
ject that could be studied and possibly understood.
Alhazen’s drawing is not explicit about anatomical structure, but
he shows the optically important proportions and curvatures of the
cornea and sclera quite accurately. His major failing is the lens; he
placed it more nearly in its correct location than Ibn Ishak had, but it
is still depicted as a large circle, presumably a cross section of a
sphere. (Note that the pupil, represented by the small circle at the
front of the lens, and the optic nerve head, the circle at the back of
the lens, are drawn as they would be seen when viewed from the
front of the eye; they have been rotated 90° relative to the plane of
the main drawing. This stylistic representation of features in their
most characteristic aspect, with different vantage points for different
features, is quite ancient; it is particularly obvious in Egyptian art. Thus
the large circle representing the lens may also be a frontal view.)
Alhazen understood image formation in terms of the camera
obscura (pinhole camera), and his drawing suggests that he believed
the image to be formed at the back surface of the lens. (The quanti-
tative law of refraction was first derived by the Dutch astronomer Figure 2
and mathematician Willebrord Snell about 600 years later.) This lo- The Eye of Alhazen
cation is wrong, but it is consistent with the powerful spherical lens This horizontal section through the midlevel of the orbits shows the
that his drawing may be indicating, and it places the emphasis where optic nerves joining behind the eyes at the optic chiasm. The relative
it should be—on the image-forming properties of the eye. The ocu- curvatures and proportions of the cornea and sclera are fairly accurate,
lar image would interact with the optic nerve, which Alhazen shows but other features, like the lens and optic nerve head, are not. This eye
running from the back of the lens to the point at which it joins the has no “visual spirit” from which rays might leave the eye to sense exter-
nerve from the other eye at the optic chiasm. (The representation nal objects. (From Polyak 1941.)