Pioneering surgery for retinal detachment in Australasia: a review

In the 1930s there was excitement worldwide with the realization that Jules Gonin's observation that closing the retinal break was the key to successful retinal re-attachment surgery. Australians and New Zealanders kept pace with these developments despite the limitations of travel and communication in the 1930s. Dr J. Bruce Hamilton of Tasmania was training at Moorfields Eye Hospital in 1930 and was exposed to the surgical technique espoused by Gonin in its first year of being adopted in Britain. Walter Lockhart Gibson was the first in Australasia to report a successful retinal re-attachment operation in 1931. In the 1960s Australians made two significant contributions to retinal surgery: the Schultz-Crock portable indirect ophthalmoscope and the first instrument for closed pars plana vitrectomy. The latter was developed at the Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital by Dr Jean-Marie Parel and Professor Gerard Crock, in association with Dr Robert Machemer, and it was used by Machemer when he carried out the world's first closed pars plana vitrectomy in 1971.