Discoveries in the Realms of Nature and Art of Healing

Ignaz von Peczely's Discoveries in the Realms of Nature and Art of Healing, published in 1881, is the primary source in which the Hungarian physician set out the iris chart he had developed roughly a decade earlier, the founding document of what became the practice of iridology, reading markings in the iris as indicators of the condition of internal organs elsewhere in the body. Its strength is that it is the founder's own original statement of the method's origin and claimed basis, the correct primary source for what Peczely himself proposed rather than a later popularizer's version of it. Its limit is significant and should be stated plainly: iridology's diagnostic claims have been tested in controlled studies since and have not been shown to reliably detect the conditions it claims to identify, so a claim about the method's effectiveness needs the modern clinical literature, not this nineteenth century founding text.