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Gullstrand’s Nobel Prize100 years and counting

2011; Wiley; Volume: 89; Issue: 8 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1755-3768.2011.02333.x

1755-3768

Stefan Seregard,

History and Developments in Astronomy

In this issue of Acta Ophthalmologica, Berndt Ehinger and Andrzej Grzybowski provide a scholarly and thoroughly enjoyable outline of the life and work of Allvar Gullstrand. On 10 December 2011, exactly 100 years will have passed since Gullstrand was awarded the 1911 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology for his noted work on the dioptrics of the eye. He is largely remembered for this, but unfortunately his contribution to a working slit lamp is much less well known even though this device is now used every day by most ophthalmologists. Ehinger & Grzybowski (2011) refer in passing to how Gullstrand was once likened to Florence Nightingale as the ‘Gentleman with the Lamp’. However, we now know that the original sobriquet ‘Lady with the Lamp’ was something of a propaganda stunt with little if any real life backing. Florence Nightingale was not the kind of gentle, compassionate figure we are sometimes led to believe, but rather she was a forceful, dominating character who knew exactly what she wanted (and how to get it) and in this she actually much resembled Allvar Gullstrand. Indeed, Gullstrand regarded himself as being far more than merely the first among equals. His contemporaries seem to have viewed him as a highly intelligent, but arrogant, egocentric. Stories of Allvar Gullstrand’s ego abound; at one time, he is supposed to have danced with a young lady and queried how she felt having the distinctive honour to dance with a Commander Grand Cross (Gullstrand had previously been invested as Commander Grand Cross of the Order of the Polar Star). However, the lady tartly replied that it tickled alluding to the heavy, pointed, star on his chest tickling her as they swirled across the dance floor. The story of how Gullstrand for some time strongly opposed Albert Einstein’s prize in Physics as he believed the Theory of Relativity to be utterly wrong is well told by Ehinger & Grzybowski (2011). Instead, Einstein had to be rewarded for the photoelectric effect, but he had the final say as his Nobel Lecture addressed the Theory of Relativity and not the photoelectric effect for which he received the Nobel Prize. Gullstrand’s banquet speech at the night after receiving the 1911 Nobel Prize was a tiresome, bombastic and highly chauvinistic tirade (arguably even by the standards of the early 1910s). At some length, he referred to the high standing and impartialness of Swedes (he may have felt some need to address this as the Karolinska Institutet after all had conferred the Prize on him, a fellow Swede). His Nobel Lecture held the following day was entitled ‘How I found the mechanism of intra capsular accommodation’, and someone later ironically remarked that the title suggested that the mechanism was something he noticed in passing, bent over and picked up from the floor rather than something that was actually discovered. Gullstrand also, reportedly, provided the funding to have his portrait painted and then presented the painting as a gift to the Swedish Society of Medicine as he felt the society had neglected to honour him by not displaying his image. The magnificent portrait (Fig. 7, Ehinger and Grzybowski 2011) still adorns one of the smaller dining rooms in the building of the Swedish Society of Medicine in Stockholm. Still, Allvar Gullstrand was no doubt a genius, one of a rare breed of scientists who made ophthalmology great. His work is so mathematically precise that the 1890 treatise on astigmatism only includes but a few pages; however, only a very select few appreciate the true significance of the formulae presented. It has been said that this work equally well could have been presented for a dissertation in mathematics. This achievement is not made less remarkable by the fact that Gullstrand to a large extent was self-taught in particular in physiological optics in which he excelled. Remaining aloof he was a theoretical giant who dominated his contemporaries for decades. It is, therefore, something of a paradox that the highly theoretical work conceived by Gullstrand also translated into much used practical realities, like the slit lamp, his reflex-free ophthalmoscope and the use of dioptres in optics. The great gold medal originally struck by the Swedish Society of Medicine for Gullstrand’s 60th birthday in 1922 is awarded only every 10 years by the Swedish Society of Medicine. The list of recipients is a gallery of legendary pioneers in ophthalmology: Alfred Vogt, Sir Stewart Duke-Elder, Hans Goldman, Ernst Custodis, Ernst Barany, Sir Harold Ridley and Robert Machemer. The Gullstrand Medal wears the inscription ‘Obscura Oculi Illustravit’ which translates as ‘enlightening the darkess of the eye’. Indeed, this is an appropriate epitaph for a man who provided the slit lamp with which we image the inside of the eye. Allvar Gullstrand was the only ophthalmologist to receive the Nobel Prize for work in ophthalmology; he was also a founding member and the first President of the Swedish Ophthalmological Society and the first Professor of Ophthalmology at Uppsala University. Today, we remember Allvar Gullstrand foremost for his genius and insight, but also for his forceful and unique character. Not many people like that are still around, and the paper on his life and work in this issue of Acta Ophthalmologica pays appropriate tribute to his memory.