Jacques Daviel

Jacques Daviel (1696 to 1762) was a French eye surgeon who changed how cataracts were treated in the eighteenth century. For many centuries the usual remedy had been couching, in which the clouded lens was pushed down out of the line of sight with a needle. Daviel trained in medicine at Rouen, practised in Marseille, limited himself to diseases of the eye from 1728 and later served at the Hospital des Invalides and as oculist to Louis XV. From the summer of 1750 he pursued removal of the lens through an incision, and on 18 September 1750 in Cologne he carried out what is documented as the first planned extracapsular cataract extraction, on a clergyman; the operation was reported in the Gazette de Cologne a few days later. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1756 and a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1759, and he died of apoplexy in 1762 while travelling to Geneva. His method opened the way to modern cataract surgery.