Louis Emile Javal

JAVAL, Louis Emile (1839–1907), an ophthalmologist, a brilliant French scientist who richly combined deep scientific creativity and a broad, versatile education with the immense popularity of a public figure. Javal initially, at the will of his father, graduated from a mining institute, but soon exchanged his started career as a mining engineer for the study of medicine, an attraction to which he had shown since childhood. An unfortunate set of circumstances in his family, namely the unsightly strabismus of his father and sister, made such a deep impression on Javal that he was seized, like an obsessive idea, by the desire to study the question of the origin of strabismus and the possibility of its non-operative treatment, which led Javal to the study of medicine and, in particular, ophthalmology. Upon graduating from the medical faculty, Javal worked in Berlin under the famous Albrecht von Graefe. The study of the question of strabismus placed him before the necessity of seriously engaging in physical and physiological optics and starting with physics. This brought Javal closer to the well-known professor of medical physics Gavarret, thanks to whose persistence the first ophthalmological laboratory was founded at the Sorbonne, of which Javal became the first director. Scientists from all over the world flocked to this laboratory; from here came Javal's closest students and collaborators, such as Tscherning (Copenhagen), Schiøtz (Christiania), and others. Javal was elected a member of the Chamber of Deputies, where he worked specifically on issues of school hygiene and education. The end of Javal's life is full of tragic interest. An outstanding ophthalmologist who left indelible marks on science, Javal found himself incurably blind from glaucoma toward the end of his life. But even the blindness that befell Javal in his old age did not break the liveliness of his mind and energy. Javal, who mastered French, English, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, and Dutch, while a blind old man, met with the inventor of Esperanto, Dr. Zamenhof, studied this language, and became a prominent member of the French Esperantist Society. During this period, Javal wrote a wonderful book, "Entre aveugles" (Paris, 1895; Russian edition, St. Petersburg, 1905), in which the psychology of a person going blind and a blind person is depicted very vividly, and many useful instructions are given to people preparing for blindness and those around them. Here, the importance of learning Esperanto for the blind is also emphasized. Javal left behind about 200 printed works on various issues of ophthalmology and school hygiene, of which two groups must be recognized as classical and of world significance. 1. Works devoted to strabismus. Here, the author strongly emphasizes the importance of binocular vision disorders for the origin of concomitant strabismus and the necessity of its restoration for the non-operative treatment of strabismus. 2. Works dealing with astigmatism, the result of which was an instrument invented by Javal in collaboration with Schiøtz for the simplest determination of astigmatism. This instrument, in the full sense of the word, transferred the difficult Helmholtz ophthalmometry from a specially equipped laboratory, where it was accessible only to chosen researchers for chosen scientific purposes, to the office of any district doctor. Javal was the first French translator and commentator of Helmholtz and Donders.