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The Lancet, Volume 376, Issue 9747, Pages 1138 - 1139, 2 October 2010
doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(10)61527-9Cite or Link Using DOI

“It's the eyes that are important”—stories about artificial eyes

Ann Lingard aEmail Address
A few years ago, when I was researching the preservation of human and animal bodies for background material for a novel, a taxidermist told me “It's the eyes that are important.” He had boxes and packets and envelopes of artificial eyes, plastic and glass, all colours and sizes, to fit animals from owls and squirrels to deer and salmon. But it wasn't just matching the colour and shape that he had to worry about, he said, it was how well he fitted the eyelids around the eyeball that would make the difference between making the animal look alive—or very dead. It turns out that the appearance of the eyes is just as important for embalmed humans. My fascination with this subject led me to search for stories about artificial eyes.
In 1715, Peter the Great spent time in Amsterdam learning, among other things, the trade of shipwright. During his stay, he visited the surgeon-anatomist and self-styled artist, Dr Frederik Ruysch (1638—1731), and was intrigued and impressed by Ruysch's extraordinary skill at embalming and anatomising. Ruysch had a “secret recipe” for embalming bodies and body parts, not just to preserve them for study and anatomical dissection, but also to arrange them as works of art. Ruysch's maid apparently spread the story that the Great Czar, on his first visit, was so taken in by an embalmed baby that was lying sweetly in its lacy cot and gazing up with open eyes, that he bent to kiss it. A different interpretation might be that he kissed it in recognition of Ruysch's “death-defying” skill in making the child appear alive.
Many of Ruysch's artworks and embalmed objects are highly moralistic and yet are often also slyly humorous. His famous Tableaux of foetal skeletons, that are depicted weeping with handkerchiefs of dried mesentery held to their empty eye sockets, are strewn with Latin tags: “Life is but a bubble”, “Brief life”, “We are dust and shadow”. Ruysch's works, his Opera Omnia, which are described in several volumes of the Thesauri and illustrated by Cornelius Huyberts' engravings, so impressed Czar Peter, who was himself a great collector, that on his second visit to the man he referred to as his “teacher” in 1717, Peter bought the whole collection and had it shipped back to his own Kunstkammer in St Petersburg.
Unfortunately nearly all of the Ruysch collection has since been broken up (or broken), but among the few remaining pieces recorded by the American photographer Rosamond Wolff Purcell, there is an uncannily life-like preserved baby's head, eyes open; another baby's head, with its eyes closed, which is held in the collection at the Boerhaave Museum in Leiden is less affecting and more like a museum specimen. We no longer know the provenance of the artificial eyes used by Ruysch and the other embalmers of his time, but wars and illnesses ensured that there would always be living people who needed a replacement for a damaged eye. The 19th-century Dresden glass-blowers, Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, became famous for their exquisite, scientifically accurate models of marine invertebrates as well as the hundreds of glass models of flowering plants that now form the Ware Collection in Boston. But initially the Blaschkas had funded their business by making a wide range of glass eyes. Other 19th-century artificial eyes, by W Halford for example, can still be seen in the Wellcome Collection. In all these cases, the irises are beautifully coloured and patterned, just like real eyes: wearers would have been spoilt for choice.
There are several inaccurate stories about philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748—1832), but he reputedly chose his own glass eyes and carried them around in his pocket for 10 years before he died. Bentham's preserved body and wax head now sits on a chair in a glass case in University College, London, an institution with which he was closely associated during his life. He requested in his will that his body should be put on display after his death—known as Bentham's Auto Icon. His head was to be preserved by a mummification process, but the head-preservation method was such a failure that his head could not be exhibited attached to his clothed skeleton. Consequently, the Auto Icon's head was modelled in wax—it was, according to his friend Lord Brougham, “so perfect that it seems as if alive”—and the head's somewhat sleepy-looking eyes look out at the world with what could be described as mild and knowing amusement. The real, but mummified, head with its glass eyes, was placed between Bentham's feet, and was later removed to a box on top of the glass case.
At about the time of Bentham's birth, the Scottish anatomist, surgeon, and man-midwife William Hunter (1718—83) had become proficient in injecting tissues with coloured wax or mercury as he attempted to trace the routes and anastomoses of lymphatics and blood vessel. His skill is evident in his series of dissections of the gravid uterus, which were modelled in coloured plaster and drawn by Jan van Rymsdyck. Much of William Hunter's Collection of specimens is now held in the Hunterian Museum at Glasgow University, and here too are the jars of human eyes that he had presumably collected for study and dissection. It's hard for us to realise that the anatomy of the human eye had not been completely worked out at that time: Ruysch had used injected preparations for the study of its vascular system; Marcello Malpighi (1628—94) had used a hand lens, and Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (1675—1725) had made the first observations with his microscope. The retina had not yet been recognised for what it was, because Schwann's concept of cells, and any knowledge of the structure and function of light-sensitive cells, was a long way in the future. The gross morphology and the nerve and blood connections of the human eye, and those too of other animals especially insects, were—as histological and microscopical techniques advanced—becoming better understood. Clemente Susini's wax sculpture, Organ of sight, reveals what was known of blood and nerve connections in 1803. Susini's models, with their warm life-like colours, are delicate and touching, as well as instructive.
Only 1 year before Susini had completed his model of the dissected face and eye, William Paley had argued in Natural Theology that the eye, like a telescope, could only have been designed by a Maker. Charles Darwin famously struggled to understand how these “organs of extreme perfection” could have arisen from chance mutations alone. “To suppose that the eye…could have been formed by natural selection seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree”, he wrote in On the Origin of Species. His cousin, Francis Galton, attempted to draw some conclusions about natural selection within the human species. Galton's was a philosophy for unnatural selection, but he called it the science of eugenics—by photographing faces and drawing up tables of their measurements and characteristics. The faces of ordinary people, of intellectuals, of criminals, stare out wide-eyed and even suspiciously from Galton's photographs. Alfonse Bertillon (1853—1914), a police chief in Paris, used these same techniques of photography, measurement, and data collection to attempt to identify criminals and other individuals: among the various markers—the shape of ears, noses, foreheads, and lips—he recognised the importance of the eyes, and that the colour and pattern of the iris could serve as a marker of individual identity. His colour plate of the Tableau des nuances de l'iris humaine is a work of art in itself. 150 years later, iris pattern recognition has become a driver of digital technology, as scanners capture and compare phenotypic genetic differences, and influence whether or not an individual will be permitted entry through doors or borders.
Just as our understanding of the morphology and histology of eyes has moved on from the 19th century so too, of course, has our knowledge of the mechanisms that control evolution and development of the eye, the genes and their intricate networks of control both within and outwith the genome. van Leeuwenhoek dissected not only human eyes, but also prepared and fitted the multifaceted eye of a honey bee to his tiny microscope and, peering at a church steeple, saw multiple inverted images of the steeple. The compound eye of the insect is so dramatically different in structure and physiology from the mammalian eye (and from that of the large single-lensed eye of the squid, modelled so beautifully in glass by the Blaschkas), and yet research on insect eyes has led to a paradigm shift in our understanding of mammalian eye evolution and development. Now, more than 300 years after van Leeuwenhoek's observations, results of research on the eye of the fruit-fly Drosophila have gone a long way to calming Darwin's worries about the evolution of the “organ of perfection”. The gene Pax6 is crucial in triggering the cellular events that form the fly eye, and if Pax6—or its related gene from the mouse or even from a mollusc like the squid—is injected into the leg-forming cells of a Drosophila embryo, the gene will switch those cells into forming a multifaceted, raspberry-like fly's eye instead of a leg. It's as though natural selection has taken the historical collection of genes and their feedbacks and controls that form each genome and has used pre-existing “bits and pieces” to try out new ways of seeing.
The importance of eyes has fascinated us for centuries. From Darwin to Pax6, and Bertillon to modern iris scanning technology, the study of eyes has stimulated our thinking and technology. The development of the human eye and the possibilities for its repair are increasingly understood—and glass, at the confluence of medicine and art, would it seems to me be the perfect medium for modelling its embryology and structure: what a loss that the Blaschkas are not still alive.

Further reading

Kemp and Wallace, 2000 Kemp M, Wallace M. Spectacular bodies. London: Hayward Gallery Publishing, 2000.
Lingard, 2009 Lingard A. The embalmer's book of recipes. Brighton: Indepenpress, 2009.
Purcell and Gould, 1992 Purcell RW, Gould SJ. Finders, keepers: eight collectors. London: Hutchinson Radius, 1992. The Bentham Project (accessed Sept 17, 2010).
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