Christian Georg Theodor Ruete

Christian Georg Theodor Ruete (May 2, 1810 - June 23, 1867) was a German ophthalmologist who was a native of Scharmbeck, Lower Saxony. In 1841 he became an associate professor at the University of Göttingen, receiving the title of "full professor" in 1847. Afterwards he was a professor of ophthalmology at the University of Leipzig from 1852 to 1867.

Christian Ruete was a pioneer of German ophthalmology, and made several important contributions in this field. In 1845 he designed the first "ophthalmotrope", which was a mechanical model of the eye and its muscles, and is used to clarify movements of the eye. In 1857 he constructed an improved version of his earlier prototype. He made modifications to Hermann von Helmholtz's ophthalmoscope by implementing a concave focusing mirror, and thereby introducing "indirect ophthalmoscopy" to allow for a stereoscopic and wider view of the fundus of the eye. Ruete also did extensive research of ophthalmic disorders such as strabismus and hypermetropia.^[1]

In 1846 Ruete published Lehrbuch der Ophthalmologie which provided the first illustration of a visual migraine aura in European medical literature. In this book he pictorially explained this phenomenon in three successive stages. With mathematician Johann Benedict Listing (1808–1882), he published a treatise on entoptic phenomena and cataract.

References

1. ^ [1] On the anomalies of accommodation and refraction of the Eye by Franciscus Cornelis Donders and William Daniel Moore

• Migraine Aura Foundation
• The polar coordinate system and Listing's Law
• Hochschulmedizin Leipzig: Fakultät- Dokumentation (Translated from German)

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Name	Ruete, Christian Georg Theodor
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Date of birth	May 2, 1810
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Date of death	June 23, 1867
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