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Ophthalmology was one of the foremost branches in medieval Islamic medicine. The oculist or kahhal (????), a somewhat despised professional in Galen’s time, was an honored member of the medical profession by the Abbasid period, occupying a unique place in royal households. The specialized instruments used in their operations ran into scores. Innovations such as the “injection syringe”, a hollow needle, invented by Ammar ibn Ali of Mosul, which was used for the extraction by suction of soft cataracts, were quite common. Muslim physicians deserve much praise for their descriptions of ophthalmological pathology. They were the first to describe such conditions as pannus, glaucoma (described as ‘headache of the pupil’), phlyctenulae, and operations on the conjunctiva. They were the first to use the words 'retina' and 'cataract'. They also pioneered the field of optics. The list of Muslim contributions to Ophthalmology is anything but brief. The scientific achievements of the late Abbasid period may perhaps be attributed to the worldview that had developed as a result of the establishment of the House of Wisdom, and intermingling of scholars from India, Persia, and the west, in Baghdad. There, an ideology began taking shape in which unlike their early Islam predecessors, did not recognize a disparity between faith and reasoning, though many doubtlessly continued to do so. The Moorish Lisan al-Din ibn al-Khatib, himself a great vizier and a man of medicine, is famous for once declaring that “whatever the traditions of the prophet might say, their remarks about exhalations from Hell cannot stand against the evidence of careful observation.” And put another way by Ibn Tufayl “Faith is for the people. But its understanding in the light of reason, is the privilege of the intellectual elite.” To become a practitioner, there was no one fixed method or path of training. There was even no formal specialization in the different branches of medicine, as might be expected. But some students did eventually approximate to a specialist by acquiring proficiency in the treatment of certain diseases or in the use of certain drugs. “The Prince of Physicians”, the Persian (Iranian) Avicenna, for example, was held to be more proficient than most others in his treatment of nervous diseases, and hence a large number of psychological cases were brought to him, the most famous being the Samanid prince Nooh ibn Mansur who thought of himself as a cow, and who was cured by Avicenna who was no more than 17 years of age. Avicenna himself benefited from the instruction of many teachers, ranging in subject from geometry to theology.
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