This is a great story about the surgeon who first perfected radial keratotomy (RK), the original vision correction surgery that used knives instead of lasers. Here’s an excerpt:
The first medical procedure that had millions of people throwing away their glasses was pioneered in Soviet Russia. Many surgeons had tried before, but Svyatoslav Fyodorov was the first to perfect radial keratotomy, or RK, a surgical procedure that corrects nearsightedness.
Fyodorov’s story is the stuff of medical myth. A little boy gets in a fight and breaks his glasses, cutting his eye. All of a sudden, he could see better. The little boy’s doctor, Fyodorov, asked himself, if accidental cuts can improve vision, what could precision cuts do?
The story may or may not be true. It’s more likely that Fyodorov, as creative a salesman as he was a surgeon, probably read about botched RK attempts in the medical literature and got to work.
It’s interesting that Fyodorov started doing laser eye surgery once people realized that the RK procedure was unstable and some people who were nearsighted became farsighted.
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