Visual Axis, blind spot, yellow spot - controversies over almost 400 years

Fernando Buzzi's detection of the yelow spot in 1782 passed almost unnoticed, but when Theodor Soemmering became aware of the macula lutea in 1791 and postulated that there was a hole at its center, he triggered long -lasting controversies. He questioned Edme Marriotte's explanation of the blind spot and predicted the collapse of Haller's doctrine on the topography of the visual axis. This invite a short review of the supposed position of the visual axis since the Arabs' Golden Age up the modern-day histological description of the fovea by Heinrich Muller. The ophthalmoscope didn't bring clarification. Indeed, there was neither a hole nor any yelow color in the macular region ! Slowly, the macular yellow enjoyed its rebirth with the observations of Schmidt-Rimpler in 1875 and of Dimmer in 1894, but then Gullstrand started a controversy of Homeric dimensions, denying the existence of a yelow pigments in the retina, initaially between 1902 and 1908 against Schmidt-Rimpler and Dimmer, ans subsequently in 1918 against Votgt, who had shown the macular yelow by ophtalmoscopy in red free light. Nordenson made an attempt to back up Gullstrand, his compatriot, in 1949. but Wald had already proven the existence of lutein in the macula by spectroscopy in 1945, wich opened up the way for the development of instruments and methods to measure xanthophyll content during life, such as Raman spectroscopy, ophthalmo-spectomety and heterochromic flicker photometry (HFP) to investigate correlations between xanthophyll content and senile macular degeneration in our time.