Eight operating tables turned on a slow revolving conveyor. A surgeon sat at the head of each one, and as the tables came around, each performed a single step of the same operation on a different patient. Including anesthesia and cleanup, the procedure took about 10 minutes.
This was the Moscow Research Institute of Eye Microsurgery in the 1980s, and the man who built it was Svyatoslav Fyodorov. His operation, radial keratotomy, corrected nearsightedness with tiny spoke-like cuts in the cornea. Fyodorov said the idea came to him after he removed glass fragments from the eyes of a boy whose eyeglasses had shattered, and noticed the boy's vision sharpened as the cuts healed.
What Fyodorov could not do was grow. NPR has reported that Soviet bureaucracy blocked his ambition of opening clinics around the world. He had not needed a market economy to invent the operation, or even to industrialize it. He needed one to scale it.
When the economic rules loosened in the late 1980s, he moved quickly — a hotel for patients beside the Moscow clinic, then branches in Italy, Poland, Germany, Spain, Yemen and the United Arab Emirates.
Then he converted an oceangoing ship, the Peter I, into a floating eye clinic and sent it to the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean. The ruble could not be traded for foreign goods, and the ship came home with hard currency. It carried 18 surgeons, performed roughly 1,500 operations a month, and came fitted with a sauna, a swimming pool and a disco.
Rick Good spent ten years in the newspaper business, including with The News & Observer (Raleigh, NC) and The Greenville News (Greenville, SC). He co-wrote, with Melinda Coleman, Rutledge to Riley: Governors of South Carolina, 1776–Present (Published by The Greenville News), and is the author of Mind Games Trivia #1 (Amazon). He has recently spent 15 years creating original trivia content through Sounds Good Mobile Entertainment and continues that with his new company, SGME Software. He edits The Smart Reader’s money, real estate, and business coverage.
