Maximilian Salzmann

If you want to feel totally inadequate in your gonioscopic technique, examine the paintings published by Maximilian Salzmann in 1914 and 1915.

Salzmann was the first person to use a contact lens to look at the iridocorneal angle. Besides being a brilliant ophthalmologist, Saltzmann was an accomplished artist. He painted these beautiful images of the iridocorneal angle. Salzmann also a made equally beautiful paintings of the fundus and of other artistic subjects.

There is a very nice review about Maximilian Salzmann by Sugar and Foster (Survey of Ophthalmology 26:28-30, 1981). Interestingly, in their review, they felt that these images had lost largely been lost to public viewing. Through the diligent efforts of my departmental librarians Patricia Duffel and Rita Gallo, we were to find the original papers in which these paintings were published and through the courtesy of S. Karger AG, Basel we are able to share them with you. My colleague, Markus H. Kuehn, Ph.D., was nice enough to translate the figure legends from the original German.

While Salzmann had invented the use of a contact lens (he used the Fick lens – a clunky scleral contact lens made for irregular astigmatism) he found this lens very difficult to use. In the wonderful “Historical Notes on Gonioscopy” (Survey of Ophthalmology 20:137-149, 1975) Dellaporta points out that, of all of the 35 publishing paintings reproduced here, only four were made with a contact lens (Kontakglass). These were figure 7 in 1914 in figure 7, 18 and 27 in 1915. The remainder of these extraordinary paintings were made using a direct ophthalmoloscope with indentation. It is humbling to see the tremendous detail that Saltzmann was able to appreciate using this very crude technique.