LAUSR

Uveitis and even the retina subspecialty were of very low priority in the ophthalmology curriculum in India, saddled with trachoma and cataract blindness in the 1950s and the 1960s. Cataract surgery was an easily learned skill not requiring much cognition and produced gratifying outcomes for all the stakeholders namely the patients, doctors, and the society. Moreover, cataract surgery till the 1980s was technically nondemanding, requiring not even a slit lamp for the diagnosis. A flashlight and a direct ophthalmoscope were what you needed to examine a patient. Any patient who did not have a cataract, trachoma, corneal ulcer, or an opacity was nobody’s burden. Most of the medical schools until the late 1980s did not even have a slit lamp for use by the faculty or the residents in training. There was hardly any exposure of our doctors to see first-hand how things were changing in the rest of the world as we had very limited financial resources. Socioeconomic and technological developments, rising aspirations of the society, and setting up of institutes in the private sector all played a key role in the development of subspecialties in ophthalmology.