Cataract surgery in its simplest form is at least 4000 years old. Couching for cataract was the earliest method at about 2000 BC, and even then was evidently practiced in the Tigris / Euphrates area, as well as India and Japan. The earliest records are from The Bible and The Red Sea Scrolls as well as early Hindu records of Susruta’s time. Records exist from 400 BC (in Hippocrates time) and from 10 AD and 200 AD (from Roman records), as well as later Arabic references, but there is little evidence in Europe during the middle or dark ages.

The premodern era dates from Daviel’s original extra-capsular surgery in 1748 leading to the advances of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries via intra-capsular surgery, implant lens prostheses, and the present small incision phacoemulsification surgery.