ABSTRACT

In his Anatomica Methodus (1535), the Spanish anatomist Andres de Laguna interrupts his dissection of the tissues of the eye to describe his initial discovery of its power:

I shall not pass over in silence something that happened to me when I was a small boy. Since I did not have enough money for my childish games and had no source from which I could obtain it I followed my father who was visiting the bedside of a nobleman ill with fever and climbed up with him to the patient's bedroom. The light there was sufficiently bright but it seemed quite dark to me since I had just come in from a brighter place. After I had rested for a while I saw by chance a purse half lying upon the sick man's bed, and because I judged, plausibly enough, that the eyes of the sick man and of those around him were dimmed as mine were (falsely, however, since they had been longer in the room and had accustomed their sight to the shadows), I came up closer and began to handle the purse. But he to whom it belonged (for illness had not deprived him of speech) said: “What are you doing with my purse? Isn't it enough that the druggists have left it thin without you to empty it completely into your hands?” I blushed and was struck dumb, and began to philosophize very energetically about light and shadows. 1