“Being able to see well is a wonderful thing — for mothers to be able to watch their children grow, for fathers to see their sons outdo them in sports. For anybody to be able to see is a lovely and mysterious thing.” – Dr. George Spaeth
When I was growing up, I watched my father practice as a very busy ophthalmologist, but I had no interest in going into medicine or into ophthalmology. I loved playing the piano and writing poetry and music. My interests were much more in the arts than in medicine. When I went to college, I didn’t really know what I was going to do, but I took pre-med courses anyway. When I finished college, I thought, “Well, I’m not a Mozart and I’m not a Bach. The world doesn’t really need another second-rate composer and I don’t think I’ll make a living as a poet.” So I decided to become a doctor because I would be able to help some people that way.
During my residency, I saw a little girl who didn’t look like a normal child. We found that she had homocystinuria, which had not been diagnosed or even discovered yet. We had discovered this new disease and found that you could treat it with a vitamin B6 effectively. That experience hooked me. I thought, “There are lots of questions out there that need to be answered. It’s nice to help people by trying to answer the unanswered questions about their health.” Being able to see well is a wonderful thing — for mothers to be able to watch their children grow, for fathers to see their sons outdo them in sports. For anybody to be able to see is a lovely and mysterious thing.
There are lots of books out there on ophthalmic surgery. Some are comprehensive. Some are focused, and cover topics like complications of retinal detachment surgery or complications of glaucoma surgery. Ophthalmic Surgery: Principles and Practice, 4th Edition is comprehensive. It covers everything that clinicians need to know, but none of the things they don’t need to know. And, it does it in a way that is articulate and clear so that the reader can feel comfortable knowing they are getting the essential information that will help them do better surgery. I think we probably do that better than any other book.
This book is very personal in many ways. My father was an ophthalmologist, and wrote what was the first major textbook of ophthalmic surgery. As I was moving along in my career, I thought, “Maybe it’s my time to write a book on surgery.” The focus of the book is on the surgical procedures that competent ophthalmologists need to know how to do. The goal is to describe the procedures sufficiently well so that the surgeons can potentially learn just from the book. Of course, now, you have to have a mentor, but in many places of the world, mentors aren’t easy to come by, so we wanted the book to be adequately comprehensive and very specific.
Recognized around the world as a foremost authority on glaucoma, George L. Spaeth, MD is the Louis J. Esposito Research Professor at Wills Eye Institute in Philadelphia. A Fellow of the American College of Surgeons, Dr. Spaeth has received countless awards and honors, including the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Academy of Ophthalmology. He has authored more than 360 articles in peer reviewed journals, hundreds of commentaries, more than 100 book chapters, 200 editorials, and 18 books. He serves on the editorial boards of six journals. He is the author of the surgical text, Ophthalmic Surgery, 4th Edition, which is used around the world.
Dr. Spaeth’s research activities have centered on the characterization and natural history of the cardinal manifestations of glaucoma: the history, the anterior chamber angle, the visual field and the optic nerve. Fellows trained by Dr. Spaeth currently work in 34 countries on six continents, and include the current or past presidents of the American Glaucoma Society, the European Glaucoma Society, the Chinese Glaucoma Society, the Pan-Arab-African Glaucoma Society, and the Christian Medical College in Lahore, India. Dr. Spaeth was founding member and the first President of the American Glaucoma Society. He was the founder and is current president of the Glaucoma Service Foundation to Prevent Blindness and served as the chair of the Ethics Committee of the American Academy of Ophthalmology.
