Eduard Zirm

Eduard Konrad Zirm (1863 to 1944) was an Austrian ophthalmologist who performed the first successful human full-thickness corneal transplant on 7 December 1905. Born in Vienna, he studied medicine at the University of Vienna and ophthalmology at its eye clinic, worked at the Second Eye Clinic there, and in 1892 took a post at a hospital in Olomouc in Moravia, where he helped found and then headed a new ophthalmology clinic. In 1905 he treated Alois Glogar, a farm labourer whose corneas had turned opaque after a lime accident. When the eyes of an injured eleven-year-old boy, Karl Brauer, could not be saved and were removed with his father's permission, Zirm used the boy's corneas as grafts. One eye developed complications, but the other stayed clear and Glogar returned to work. Without an operating microscope or microsurgical instruments the graft could not be sutured to the host tissue, so Zirm closed the junction with conjunctival tissue. His method remains a basis for repairing corneal damage. Outside medicine he played the violin, studied natural philosophy and wrote poems and stories. He died in Olomouc in 1944.