PREFACE

Great traditions are the most valuable assets which a hospital or a teaching establishment can possess. They give it a personality which makes it beloved and respected. Traditions are made up of the energies and enterprise of those who have gone before, and will live on from generation to generation long after the bones of those who have created them have crumbled into dust. The primary aim of this book is to put on record the traditions of the Moorfields Eye Hospital for the benefit of past, present, and future workers within its walls.

So intimately associated has this Hospital been with all the discoveries and developments which have taken place in connection with ophthalmology during the nineteenth century, that it was not possible to write a history of the first hundred years of its existence without giving an account of them also. By having done this, it is hoped that the book may find a wider circle of readers than those for whom it was in the first instance intended.

An endeavour has been made to give an account of events as they have happened in chronological order, and by so doing to produce the effect of a cinematograph film, rather than that of an album of photographs.

For the facts recorded, numerous different sources have been tapped. Much information as to the commencement of the Institution has been derived from Barnsby Cooper’s biography of his uncle, Sir Astley Cooper. Great use has been made of the minute books of the Committee of Management of the Hospital, and of its annual reports.

For biographical details, the Dictionary of National Biography has been consulted, and also the articles on the “British Masters of Ophthalmology” which have been published in the British Journal of Ophthalmology.

It has been said that “when a medical man begins to write on the history of his subject it is a sure sign of senility.” The writer of these traditions does not claim that his case is any exception to this rule. In early life a man has to learn history. In middle life he is engaged in making history; and it is in his later years that he becomes best qualified to write history. It is then that, on looking back, he obtains the most comprehensive view, and is able to regard objects in their truest perspective.

In conclusion I have to thank the Committee of Management of the Hospital for its permission to reproduce the portraits of several former members of the surgical staff, which hang in its Board Room; also the British Journal of Ophthalmology for permission to use the blocks of some of the illustrations which have been published in its pages; and lastly my friend Mr. Frank Juler for kindly reading through and correcting the proof-sheets.