Jakob Stilling

Jakob Stilling, born in 1842 and died in 1915, was a German ophthalmologist who practised in Kassel and later held a titular professorship at the University of Strassburg. He studied medicine in several cities including Paris and Würzburg, took his doctorate in 1865, became an eye doctor in Kassel in 1867 and kept furthering his training in ophthalmic medicine in Paris, Berlin, Vienna and Turin. In 1877 he introduced Stilling's colour table, the first pseudoisochromatic plates used in the diagnosis of colour blindness, about forty years before the now ubiquitous Ishihara test. In 1887 he described an eye movement disorder that became known as Stilling's syndrome, which also goes by the name Duane syndrome after the American ophthalmologist Alexander Duane, who gave a more comprehensive description in 1905. He also wrote a study of glaucoma, Zur Theorie des Glaukoms, published in Albrecht von Graefe's Archiv für Ophthalmologie. His father was the surgeon Benedikt Stilling.