---
For hundreds of years, people had wondered whether it might be possible to capture an image of our last vision at the point of death. The idea was first put forward in the 17th century by a Jesuit friar named Christopher Schiener, who claimed to observe a faint image on the retina of a frog he had been dissecting. It wasn’t until the invention of photography in the 1840s, however, that “optography” emerged as a scientific pursuit. It reached the height of popularity in the last decades of the 19th century after the German physiologist, Wilhelm Kuhne, devised a process in 1878 which he believed helped to preserve details from the retina of the eye.
---
Ultimately, optography fell from fashion due, in part, to the impracticalities of processing retinal images. The last serious scientific attempt at retrieving images from retinas took place in 1975 when police in Heidelberg, Germany, invited the physiologist, Evangelos Alexandridis, to repeat Kuhne’s experiments in order to determine whether or not optograms could be used in forensic investigations.
---
