[C]ataract surgery has been employed for more than 20 centuries. The primary surgical technique for the large majority of this time was a procedure called couching. The first written description of couching is from an Indian surgeon, Susruta, circa 600 BC, involving the insertion of a needle into the eye and displacement of the lens out of the visual axis through either inferior or superior dislocation.
2006, Sanduk Ruit, Geoffrey C. Tabin, Charles C. Wykoff, “Cataract Surgery”, in Fighting Global Blindness: Improving World Vision through Cataract Elimination, Washington, D.C.: American Public Health Association, page 21