Anatomy of the Eye and Visual Human System

About seventeen years ago I was asked to teach anatomy to the Ophthalmology Residency Program at the University of Siena. After acceptance, the first question I asked myself was: what about the textbook? I started looking for a suitable textbook to propose to the students and I was astonished noticing that, with the remarkable exception of “Wolff’s Anatomy of the Eye and Orbit” by Bron AJ, Tripathi RC and Tripathi BJ, at that time apparently there was no other manual specifically designed for this purpose.

After few years, I decided to cover this gap writing a book myself. My intention was to propose it to every post-graduate student who wanted to study the eye. Therefore, the book is meant to be useful to ophthalmologists who are looking for a solid anatomic background for their clinical activity as well as to PhD students who are engaged in basic sciences.

The book is structured in a classic way, with chapters dedicated to the orbit, to its innervation and vascularization, and to the eye and its annexes. However, the reader will also find two chapters devoted to the optic pathways: one chapter deals with the intraocular pathways, intended as the circuits outlined by retinal cells and the way they process visual information; the second chapter deals with the pathway followed by visual information outside the eyeball after retinal processing. This includes the classic pathway involving the lateral geniculate nucleus that ends to the striate cortex as well as the anatomy of the striate cortex itself and of the associative visual areas.

In addition, the reader will find a chapter reserved to the control of eye and eyelid motility. Yes, it is true that this chapter should be the target of neuroophthalmologists more than of ophthalmologists. However, I believe that knowledge of the way eye motility is regulated is a matter that cannot be totally ignored by ophthalmologists. In addition, as the ambition behind this book is also to interest researchers involved in basic sciences, I thought it was only fair to dedicate a chapter to this important matter.

Finally, a chapter on the topographic anatomy of the eye within the orbit was mandatory. As it is customary for topographic anatomy, this chapter summarizes elements scattered throughout several other parts of the book with the specific aim of underlining relationships among intraorbital organs. The gestation of this book was very long. One reason for this was that it took time to gather the iconography. All collaborators helped me in this task and a very important role was played by Dr. Jan Langermans and Dr. Ivanela Kondova that provided very good material from the Biomedical Primate Research Center in Rijswijk, Netherlands. The Biomedical Primate Research Center was indeed pivotal in the realization of this project.

A consequence of the long gestation of the book was that other textbooks dedicated to the anatomy of the eye have been published in the last few years. They are very good products and probably I cannot compete with them. Nevertheless, I truly hope that inspecting this text the reader will find some original cues that will make worthwhile its consultation.

One thing I can guarantee. I really did my very best.
Prof. Eugenio Bertelli