Traitè De La Cataracte Et Du Glaucoma. Par M. Brisseau le fils Medecin Major des Hôpitaux du Roy, & Pensionnaire de la Ville de Tournay. Translated: Treatise On the Cataract And Of Glaucoma. By Mr. Brisseau the son, Physician, Chief Physician of the King’s Hospitals, and Pensioner of the City of Tournai. French Language, First Edition.

Traitè De La Cataracte Et Du Glaucoma. Par M. Brisseau le fils Medecin Major des Hôpitaux du Roy, & Pensionnaire de la Ville de Tournay. Translated: Treatise On the Cataract And Of Glaucoma. By Mr. Brisseau the son, Physician, Chief Physician of the King’s Hospitals, and Pensioner of the City of Tournai. French Language, First Edition. 12mo.(3.5" x 6") (16), 260, (12) pp. + four folding plates. 1709. Paris: Laurant d'Houry. Rebacked in brown polished leather with small corners, retaining the original marbled boards. Spine with gilt rule and gilt lettering to red leather towards the head, gilt year at foot. Refreshed endpapers. Title page with prior owners signature, another scribbled out (see pic), none affecting text. Pages evenly toned, a few with tiny chips to edges. Four folding medical plates of eye surgery to rear of volume with explanations and table of contents. Last two plates with darkened edge and small tears and/or chips (see pic). Overall, a beautiful smaller book and a scholarly treatise of cataracts and surgery to correct, from 1709! A first edition of this work. M. Brisseau (Michel Brisseau, 1676–1743) was a French surgeon who, in the early 18th century, was a key figure in correctly identifying a cataract as an opacification of the eye's crystalline lens, rather than a membrane forming in front of it. Before Brisseau and his contemporary Antoine Maître-Jan, it was widely believed that a cataract was a skin or membrane that grew in front of the lens. Through post-mortem dissections, most notably of a soldier's eye in 1705, Brisseau demonstrated that the lens itself became opaque. In his 1709 book, Traité de la cataracte et du glaucoma (Treatise on Cataract and Glaucoma), Brisseau proposed that the term "cataract" should be used exclusively for lens opacities. He also suggested that "glaucoma" be used for cases of greenish changes in the vitreous humor (which often occur behind a clear lens in cases of absolute glaucoma), helping to define the two conditions as distinct. This new anatomical understanding laid the groundwork for modern cataract surgery. Once the cataract was known to be the lens itself, the practice of couching (dislocating the lens out of the visual axis) eventually gave way to the concept of planned lens extraction, a procedure pioneered later by Jacques Daviel in the mid-18th century.