[Eye Department of the Copenhagen Municipality. Part I: 1864-1929].

On occasion of the total discontinuation of the independent Eye Department of the Copenhagen Municipality in December 1996 replaced by Rigshospitalet (the State Hospital) and Frederiksberg Hospital (H.S., Hovedstadens Sygehusfaellesskab) the first half of its history will be outlined below. The first municipal eye department was St. Annae Eye Hospital (Prince Willhelm's Palace) opened in 1864 to relieve the pressure on Department I of General Surgery in the Copenhagen Municipal Hospital. It was established because of the military epidemic eye disease which was due presumably to an adenovirus, in some cases complicated by trachoma, allergy, eye diphtheria or possibly gonorrhoea. The head of the Eye Hospital was Heinrich Lehmann (1815-90) who had been, as early as 1852, the first to demonstrate in Denmark the ophthalmoscope (invented by Herman v. Helmholtz in 1850). From 1855 Lehmann was in charge of a municipal ophthalmological out-patient department in Vingaardsstraede. St. Annae Eye Hospital was closed down 9 months later, as the epidemic was decreasing. Eye diseases were still treated in Department I of the Municipal Hospital under Carl David Withusen (1822-74) who was not "merely" a general surgeon, but also an eye surgeon like his father, Carl Christopher W., and published papers on cataract surgery and iridectomy, operations which his father had also done previously. ...