Friedrich August von Ammon (1799-1861)

As this year marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Friedrich August von Ammon (1799-1861), it presents an opportunity to recall and celebrate Ammon's life and his many contributions that helped shape both ophthalmology and plastic surgery into independent specialties. Some 250 years after Georg Bartisch, Ammon reestablished Dresden as a major center of ophthalmology, through the creation of a teaching institute, the publication of influential periodicals, and his personal publication of important monographs and journal articles. Ammon's Zeitschrift für die Ophthalmologie (founded 1830) was only the third journal in history that had been entirely devoted to ophthalmology. His prize-winning treatise, De Iritide (1835), correctly categorized iritis and gave a detailed description of sympathetic ophthalmia. His beautiful color-plate atlas, Klinische Darstellungen (1838-1841), contains landmark descriptions of congenital eye anomalies and has been described by Norman as 'the best summary of the knowledge of diseases of the eye prior to the introduction of the ophthalmoscope.' Ammon made most of his literary contributions in ophthalmology but he also contributed to another emerging field, plastic surgery. His monograph, Die plastische Chirurgie (1842), critically and comprehensively surveyed the entire history and current practice of plastic surgery, one of the very first textbooks to achieve this goal. In his last monograph (1858) Ammon returned to the subject of embryology of the human eye and drew upon his 30 years of study. Before his death, two of his last papers reported ophthalmoscopic observations, demonstrating his exploration of the frontiers of ophthalmology that characterized his entire career.