MISSED CONNECTIONS: William Briggs’s illustration in Nova visionis theoria depicts how he thought vision occurred. As drawn in Fig. II (above, top), he held that the optic nerves from each eye remained distinct, “for that the nerves. . . cross one another. . . is not to be imagined; but those that are in the thalami optici on the right side run distinctly to the right eye, and those on the left accordingly.” In Fig. III, he depicted how tension in the thalamic fibers conveyed visual input as “vibrations” to the nerves, like vibrations in a spider’s web. Both ideas turned out to be incorrect, yet his detailed anatomical surveys provided the foundation for much of the future study of the eye. COURTESY OF THE ROYAL COLLEGE OF OPHTHALMOLOGISTSIn 1663, budding ophthalmologist William Briggs, just 13 years old, enrolled at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge, England, where he befriended a 21-year-old Isaac Newton. Newton derived much of his anatomical knowledge of the eye from watching Briggs dissect the eyes of various animals, yet Briggs’s theories of visual processing were considered little more than rubbish, and his friend’s scientific reputation soon eclipsed his own.
As a personal physician to King William III, Briggs was a prominent medical professional in 17th-century England. Despite his reputation as a doctor, he is mostly remembered “as a sort of footnote in Newton’s life,” says ophthalmologist Daniel Albert of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “His major contribution was to get Newton thinking about vision.”
Briggs’s own theories of vision culminated in his second book, Nova visionis theoria, “A New Theory of Vision.” Published in 1685, the 80-page vellum-bound manuscript included two case studies of patients with different forms of blindness and a 1681 paper, presented to the Royal Society of London, in which Briggs outlined his theory of the basis of binocular vision—how information from a pair of forward-facing eyes combines to form a single ...
