Abstract

SA.13.04

Hans Goldmann (1899 -1991), the man who coined the daily practice in ophthalmology for the last 50 years

Balder P. Gloor
Zürich, Switzerland

Objective: To make a short presentation of the CV of Hans Goldmann and then to demonstrate the tremendous influence he had on the practice of ophthalmology in the whole world over the last 70 years.
Methods: Workup of the publications and inventions of Hans Goldmann and of his contemporaries and followers, referring the equipment in the offices of ophthalmologists and eye hospitals 1935-2008; recollections of contemporaries and of my own.
Results: Instruments: In 1933 Goldmann introduced a new slitlamp microscope that could be moved in three dimensions with one hand. Essential was that this freed the other hand for manipulations on the eye of the patient. 1938 he added an interposable prism to reduce the angle between illumination and observation beam, to allow gonioscopy and fundoscopy with contact lenses on the sitting patient. With this gonioscopy reached suitability for every days work. Gonioscopy allowed him the breakthrough in the separation of angle closure from open angle glaucoma (together with Barkan).1945 he published “The Basics of Exact Perimetry” and presented the self registering cupola perimeter. 1954 followed the applanation tonometer, 1958 the Haag Streit Slitlamp 900. Outstanding was his research in pathophysiology of glaucoma: Determination of the volume of the anterior chamber 1941, detection of the aqueous veins 1945 (with Asher), prove that these contain aqueous in 1949, measurement of aqueous production by fluorescein dilution curves 1950, determination of outflow resistance (Goldmann formula) 1951.
Conclusions: Goldmanns constructions of new instruments were focused on better understanding of function and of the most important disease processes of the eye. The presentation of every new instrument was accompanied by a clinical article making its practical use obvious – and obligatory! Astonishing is not only, that instruments developed from 1933 until 1958 determined the every days work until the 21st century, but that it has been one single man, who had invented these.

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