Jacques Daviel: The Invention of Modern Cataract Surgery

Jacques Daviel’s development of cataract extraction was the culmination of observations and insights by others that spanned many centuries. The location of the lens in the eye and the function of the lens in vision puzzled the physicians and scholars of antiquity and medieval times. Even more elusive was an understanding of the true identity of the lens’s dark twin, the cataract. It was not until these mysteries were finally resolved in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that a reasonably safe and effective solution to cure the vision loss caused by cataract could be sought. This, in turn, required a surgeon with unique knowledge, experience, skill and ingenuity. These traits were found in the French surgeon Jacques Daviel (1693–1762) (Fig. 1), who, in a landmark advance in the history of ophthalmology, presented his new method of cataract extraction to the French Academy of Surgery on the 13th of April, 1752. Understanding the Anatomy of the eye