[From Beer's knife to the tunnel incision]

The authors present an account on the development of surgical techniques used in operations of cataract. Surgery of cataract was started on April 8, 1745 when the Frenchman Jaques Daviel made the first extraction of an opaque lens by limbal incision. This new method was enforced, however, very slowly and only after 100 years it finally celebrated victory over the hitherto widely used reclination. In the fifties of the present century a great advance in the surgery of cataract was the introduction of cryoextraction; at the First Ophthalmological Clinic a double-jacket instrument was designed which was filled with crushed CO2. The first cryoextraction was made at the authors' department on October 7, 1964, it was the very first operation of this type in Czechoslovakia.