[The Ribe family during the 1700- and 1800 centuries. A distinguished family of doctors in Stockholm].
The Ribe family descended from Mecklenburg. The first member Mathias Bernhard Ribe, arriving in Stockholm 1660, became appointed barber-surgeon to the court of King Charles XI and elected as Director of the Surgical Society 1693. In the following three generations, seven members of the family, after basic university studies in Uppsala and lengthy stays at foreign universities and hospitals, returned to Sweden practising surgery or medicine in Stockholm and Gothenburg. A biography of each of the Ribe doctors is presented. Two members of the family are specially interesting from ophthalmological point of view, Evald and Carl-Fredric Ribe. They were both fellows of the Royal Swedish Academy of Science. In the proceedings of the Academy they have published articles dealing with ophthalmological subjects. Evald Ribe gives a case report on treatment of a young man with a sudden loss of vision and partly paralized due to a traumatic accident. After repeated treatments with emetica, part of the vision returned, also the capability to move the paralysed right fingers, hand and arm. Carl-Fredric Ribe described the surgical technique on a case of cataracta lactea, and the surgical treatment of a young man with a probable conjunctivitis gonorroica. - When he is resigning from a period as president of the Academy, he gives a lecture reviewing the contemporary knowledge of the physiology and pathology of the eye, and advises about treatment of various eye diseases.