Ammar al-Mawsili's hollow cataract needle
Aguja hueca para cataratas de Ammar al-Mawsili
- Date
- c. 1010 · confidence medium
- Place
- Cairo, Egypt
- Credited to
- Ammar ibn Ali al-Mawsili
- People
- 👤 Ammar ibn Ali al-Mawsili996–1020
- Field
- Life & health
⚠️ Disputed: the sources disagree.
What it is
Hollow metal needle with which he extracted the opaque lens by suction instead of displacing it, as he describes in his treatise on ophthalmology. It is a forerunner of aspiration cataract extraction.
The text describes the instrument, but it is debated whether suction worked on hard cataracts; later oculists mostly continued to use couching.
What it led to
- lens aspiration techniques
- Arabic surgical ophthalmology
- modern cataract surgery