TRANSPLANTATION OF THE CORNEA

Abstract

It is my aim in the present article to offer to my colleagues only my personal experience with corneal transplantation. I shall refer to the literature on this subject only for comparison of certain facts with my own experience. I shall omit the history, as I think it is already well known. I should like only to draw attention to the fact that the idea of keratoplasty belongs to Reisinger, Riecke, Mosnez and Himly, to von Hippel and Power, who achieved it technically, and to Zirm who in the beginning of the twentieth century was successful with his famous case. It was Elschnig who actually inspired the ophthalmologists with his splendid work to follow the torch of research in the problem of the transplantation with the assurance of its great future success. I made my first attempts at corneal transplantation in 1912; in 1922 I started to work on the