I love buying stuff on e-bay (try http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKtlK7sn0JQ !) but today’s find is perhaps my favourite to date – what it is?
This is an ophthalmoscope by Andrew Stanford Morton at the turn of the 19th to 20th centuries. In its obituary to him in 1927, the British Journal of Ophthalmology stated:
Well of course current ophthalmoscopes are a darn site easier to use, but a quick look inside the mechanism of this machine of over one hundred years ago shows its intricacy with thirty lenses rotated to give the desired dioptre setting.
This figure is from Casey Albert Wood’s wonderful monograph ‘The Fundus Oculi of Birds as viewd through the ophthalmoscope’ and below is a line drawing from the same volume of Morton’s ophthalmoscope being used to view a bird’s eye.
