Borri, the Prophet, on the “Restitutio Humorum” and on Lens Aspiration in the 17th Century

Abstract

The son of a renowned Milan physician, the Italian physician, alchemist, prophet, and founder of a sect, Giuseppe Francesco Borri (1627–1695), was educated by Jesuits in Rome. After experiencing an epiphany of St. Michael he became a prophet and founded a sect. Persecuted by the inquisition and condemned to death, he fled to Strasbourg, later to Amsterdam, Hamburg and Copenhagen. In each place he started with the highest protection but was later expelled. On his last journey from Copenhagen to Istanbul he was taken captive in Austria and extradited by the Emperor to the Pope in Rome, where he died a prisoner. In Amsterdam Borri cut open the eye of a dog, expressed the lens together with the aqueous and vitreous, instilled a liquid and showed that the eye regained its shape and the humors were reformed. He later repeated his experiment in Copenhagen on a goose. Borri’s experiment was widely discussed by the 17th century scientific community, e.g. by Thomas Bartholin, Ole Borch [Olaus Borrichius], Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Johann Daniel Major and Theophile Bonet. In Copenhagen he also claimed that it was possible to aspirate the lens through a cannula, after mashing it up with a brush of metal wires, which was to be inserted into the eye through the cannula. Thus, Borri was one of the first to show that the three humours – aqueous, lens and vitreous – were not needed for seeing. He envisaged the techniques of small incision lens removal after intraocular lens destruction and of lens replacement by surgery, ideas that were realized 300 years later by Charles Kelman and Sir Harold Ridley.