Benediktos Adamantiades and his forgotten contributions to medicine.

Benediktos Adamantiades was born in Prousa, Asia Minor in 1875, studied at the Medical School of the University of Athens and specialised in ophthalmology in Paris. After being director of the Ophthalmology Department of Hippocration Hospital in Athens he developed significant scientific activities. During the annual meeting of the Medical Society of Athens on November 15, 1930, Adamantiades presented "A case of relapsing iritis with hypopyon" identifying the three major signs of the so called Adamantiades-Behçet's disease and insisting on a single clinical entity. In the same year, his lecture was published in the Proceedings of the Medical Society of Athens, and in 1931 in the French journal Annales d'Oculistique. In the year 1946, Adamantiades defined thrombophlebitis as the 4th major sign of the disease. Later, he presented the first classification of the disease by describing the ocular, mucocutaneous and systemic forms in a review work. He pointed out that the disease can occur for years as a monosymptomatic or oligosymptomatic disorder and that eye involvement and severe prognosis are more common in men than in women. In this work he also proposed the first diagnostic criteria. In addition to Adamantiades-Behçet's disease, Adamantiades described the interstitial keratitis in trachomatic patients to be a bacterial infection and classified the epidemic idiopathic hemeralopia. Further pioneer works were those on the marginal corneal degeneration, the posterior vitreous detachment, the measurement of the optic fundi and of the ocular pressure as well as investigations on trachoma and the pathogenesis of glaucoma. Adamantiades compiled over 150 scientific papers many of which marked a new stage in his field. He died in 1962 in Athens.