The first IOL was implanted by Sir Harold Ridley on Nov. 29, 1949, at St. Thomas’ Hospital in London. Amazing to me, it was a monofocal posterior chamber lens, or PCL, manufactured by Rayner and implanted after large-incision extracapsular cataract extraction. Sixty years later, the procedure of PCLs implanted after small-incision ECCE with the nucleus removed by phacoemulsification in more affluent countries and manually in less affluent countries remains dominant.
Topical anesthesia was common and sutureless incisions standard in Ridley’s days following a Graefe knife incision
Uncategorized