ABSTRACT
There is probably no surer way to make a fool of oneself than to try to predict the future. Had someone asked me 20 years ago, when I was a medical student, to forecast the advances that would affect the first half of my own practice I wonder if I could have possibly foreseen the sweeping changes that have made things so different now: effortless access to information and communication, decoding of the entire genome, paradigm shifts in the economics of medicine leading to limitation of resources, and my own progressive inability to work through the night and still be fresh the next day, to name just a few. I think the safest way to approach the delicate exercise of prognostication is to take a safe course. I cannot anticipate the insights, advances, and technology that will certainly make our current techniques fodder for amusing anecdotes
one day, but I can identify areas that I hope will improve. In this monograph, I will review a bit of the history of orbital surgery that got us to where we are now. It is interesting to see which concepts and techniques were abandoned, and which ones stuck. We will look at the ideas and technologies that most significantly pushed our discipline along to the next level. Then, I will consider the areas in which our current concepts and techniques are still most wanting. By tracking the trajectory of the development of the discipline of orbital surgery, and assuming a certain amount of inertia, perhaps we can best imagine where it is going.
