In 1905 a blind labourer saw for the first time with someone else's cornea

Olomouc, Moravia, 7 December 1905. Eduard Zirm, an eye surgeon aged 42, stitches a thin sheet of cornea onto the right eye of Alois Glogar, a labourer blinded months earlier by quicklime. The cornea comes from the right eye of Karl Brauer, an eleven-year-old boy who, that same day, had lost both eyes to a metal splinter in a factory. When the bandage is removed, Glogar recognises the doctor's hand against the light. It is the first human tissue transplant in history that survives.

Before Zirm there had been dozens of attempts —with rabbit corneas, pig corneas, hand-stitched patches without anaesthetic—; all failed to rejection or infection. Zirm had two awkward advantages: the cornea is a tissue almost without blood vessels, so the immune system barely attacks it; and the donor was a boy of just hours earlier, with intact tissue. The next day he published the case in the Archiv für Ophthalmologie with a pencil sketch and seven lines: pupil reactive, sees shadows, sees fingers at 30 centimetres.

Glogar recovered enough to read large print again and go back to manual work. He died in 1911, six years later, with the cornea still transparent. Zirm's operation has since been repeated more than two million times in the long century behind us; the right eye of an eleven-year-old boy remains the point at which transplant medicine began.