Painter Claude Monet was in despair. The year was 1922, and he admitted to friends

that he simply could not go on like this. He would have to give up painting forever.

The origins of his despair were simple. His eyes. Monet's fellow artist Paul Sezon once

said that quote, Monet was only an eye, but my God, what an eye. It was true. Monet

famously painted ponds and water lilies, and he was so obsessive about the light and

color that he often returned to the same scene dozens of times to capture every nuance.

Few painters in history could match his visual precision. But late in life, Monet's

wanted eyes came under threat. He developed cataracts and painfully slowly began going blind.

The ordeal crushed his spirit. To him, life without painting was no life at all. He had

already tried to kill himself once as a young man, and he surely must have considered

suicide again. There was another option, though. Monet could undergo surgery to remove

the cataracts. Nowadays, cataract surgery is routine. Quick, safe, and easy. Back then,

it was a different story. Monet had, in fact, seen fellow painters lose everything after

unsuccessful cataract operations. But eventually, with his livelihood on the line,

Monet went under the knife. And remarkably, the surgery introduced a whole new phase in

his artistic career. Why? Because the operations seemingly changed how his eyes worked. It

made them, in some ways, even better than before. Now, this might seem unfair, given how

good his eyes were already. But as we now know, the surgery Monet was terrified to face actually

gave his eyes something close to a human superpower. The ability to see a whole new kind of color.

In the Science History Institute, this is Sam Keane and the Disappearing Spoon, a topsy,

turvy, science-y history podcast, where footnotes become the real story.

Before we explain what happened to Monet's eyes, we need to take a quick detour into how

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