The clinical procedure of fitting haptic lenses

Historical Significance: John Strachan was a Melbourne optometrist who from the mid 1950s specialised in contact lenses at his practice in Collins Street, Melbourne and was one of the pioneers of contact lenses in Australia. He qualified in optometry at the Australian College of Optometry obtaining his LOSc diploma in 1949. He subsequently travelled to London where he completed his Fellowship of the British Optical Association with honours (FBOA HD) and also completed the course leading to the Certificate of Contact Lens Practice (CCLP). He fitted scleral contact lenses using the moulding technique and was among the first in Australia to do so. Earlier contact lens practitioners such as Melbourne optometrist Ernst Goetz used trial lens sets. He taught contact lenses in the Australian/Victorian College of Optometry from 1955 to 1974. He made this film to show the techniques he used to fit scleral (haptic) contact lenses by taking a mould of the eyes from which a cast was made using dental cast material. The PMMA lenses was made from this cast and the lenses were later modified by hand using fluoroscein dye under UV light in the eye to judge areas of tight and loose fit. The film shows these techniques. FE Muller, Adolf Fick and Louis Giraud are credited with the devlopment of glass hand blown scleral contact lenses in 1887 - 1888. Hungarian ophthalmologists developed in 1929 the technique of mouldin the living human eye for the purpose of making better fitting and PMMA was used tho make the lenses from the 1930s. although Zeiss and other companies made glass fitting sets of scleral contact lenses that were is use in the 1930s and 1940s.