Summary
When Jose Rizal was young, his parents discovered that he had good intellectual skills
and was also a talented boy. That’s why at the age of 3 years old, he already knew the alphabet
in which his mother became his first teacher. And at the age of 5, he already knew how to read
and write. During his high school years, he graduated with the highest honors at the age of 16 at
the Ateneo Municipal De Manila. After high school, he then pursued his training of land
surveying and completed his training in the year 1877. In the following year, he passed the
exam in order to get his license in the field but unfortunately because he was only 17 at that
time, he was unable to receive a license due to underage and for that circumstance, it made
Jose Rizal decide to take a class and become a medical student at the University of Santo
Tomas. However, because of alleging discrimination of Dominican professors against Filipino
students, he later decided to quit the school. And then in May 1882, without his parents
knowing, Rizal went to Madrid, Spain. Upon his arrival, he enrolled at the University Central De
Madrid as a medical student.
Later in June 1884, he received his medical degree at an age of 23 and the following
year, Jose Rizal graduated from the philosophy and letter department. But then again, his
journey of being a student still has not yet ended, so after he graduated to the philosophy and
letters department, he took the field of ophthalmology. This is because he was inspired by his
mother’s progressive blindness. So, he studied at the University of Paris. Jose Rizal worked in
the eye clinic of Dr. Louis De Wecker, a famous French ophthalmologist. He introduced
ophthalmoscopy into France and advanced ocular surgery. He modified cataract and strabismus
surgery, devised a new method of enucleation, advocated sclerotomy for the treatment of
glaucoma, and was the first to use the term “filtration”. He worked for Dr. Louis De Wecker from
November 1885 to February 1886. In February 1886, Rizal moved to Heidelberg, to further his
knowledge in ophthalmology and in the year 1887, Jose Rizal finally finished his second
doctorate at Heidelberg.
Augenklinik (Eye Clinic) of Otto Becker, he was professor of ophthalmology at the
University of Heidelberg from 1868 to 1890 and helped make this department one of the best in
Germany. Rizal spent the next 6 months working as an assistant to Becker. On his way back to
Dr. De Wecker’s clinic in Paris in 1887, Rizal took time to travel through Europe to learn from
and visit with some additional prominent ophthalmologists and scientists. Among the
ophthalmologists he visited, probably the most well-recognized today is Ernst Fachs, whom he
visited and worked with for a short time in Vienna. In Berlin, Rizal met Rudolph Virchow, the
“Father of pathology”, who invited him to become a member of the Berlin Anthropological
Society. Rizal practiced ophthalmology, mainly in Calamba (August 1887-February 1888). In
Hong Kong (November 1891-June 1892). While in exile in the town of Dapitan (July 1892-July
1896). In Calamba in 1887, Rizal finally began to fulfill his lifelong dream of caring for his
mother’s eyesight. In Hong Kong in 1892, he successfully removed the cataract from his
mother’s left eye.
Rizal really only had 2 patients: his mother and his country.
