Cataract surgery is most common in human surgery and comprises 80% of eye surgery programs. Owing to sophisticated technologies, it has become a routine surgery with lowered complications rate; hence, the functional outcome is more conditioned by operative trauma. The aim of this study was to demonstrate the significance of specular microscopy in the evaluation of operative trauma during extra-capsular cataract extraction (ECCE) and phacoemulsification (P), in a controlled environment. The study included 100 consecutive patients who met the established criteria, and groups were formed according to the type of surgery by the assignment of successive numbers from a random number table. Examination and photographs of the corneal endothelium, as well as pachymetry were performed on Keeler-Konan Poclington Specular Microscope (KSP). The obtained results revealed significant dissimilarity in endothelial cell reduction (9.17% in group E, and 4.72% in group P), which generated statistically significant correlation of pre-operative and post-operative pachymetry in the group E (p=0.0004). On the basis of the results obtained by specular microscopy, it was concluded that under the same conditions phacoemulsification caused reduced operative trauma of the corneal endothelium.