Shattered Glass Inspired Fyodorov's Keratotomy

A nearsighted boy got into a fistfight that shattered his glasses and sent glass into his eyes. Russian ophthalmologist Svyatoslav Fyodorov removed the fragments and noticed that the boy's vision improved markedly as the cuts in his cornea healed. Fyodorov tried to reproduce the effect with precise surgical cuts and introduced radial keratotomy, an early predecessor of LASIK, in 1979.

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