Christian Georg Theodor Ruete

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Christian Georg Theodor Ruete (May 2, 1810 - June 23, 1867) was a German ophthalmologist who was a native of Bremen. He was a "full professor" of ophthalmology at the Universities of Göttingen (1841-1852) and Leipzig (1852-1867).

Christian Ruete was a pioneer of German ophthalmology, and made several important contributions in this field. In 1845 he designed the first "ophthalmotrope", which was a mechanical model of the eye and its muscles, and is used to clarify movements of the eye. In 1857 he constructed an improved version of his earlier prototype. He made improvements to Hermann von Helmholtz's ophthalmoscope, and introduced "indirect ophthalmoscopy" to allow for a stereoscopic and wider view of the fundus of the eye. Ruete also did extensive research of ophthalmic disorders such as strabismus and hypermetropia.

In 1846 Ruete published Lehrbuch der Ophthalmologie which provided the first illustration of a visual migraine aura in European medical literature. In this book he pictorially explained this phenomena in three successive stages. With mathematician Johann Benedict Listing (1808–1882), he published a treatise on entoptic phenomena and cataracts.

[edit] References

• Migraine Aura Foundation
• The polar coordinate system and Listing's Law
• Hochschulmedizin Leipzig: Fakultät- Dokumentation (Translated from German)