E. Treacher Collins : obituary.

Date:
[1932]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: E. Treacher Collins : obituary. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    to the Royal College of Surgeons in 1894, and in these lectures will be found the germ of much work which he subsequently elaborated. The lectures, revised and en¬ larged, were published in book form in 1896 under the title of Researches into the Anatomy and Pathology of the Eye. It was this work which gained for him the Middlemore Prize of the British Medical Association. But probably what Collins valued more than anything else was that it was his period of office as curator that estab¬ lished the repute of Moorfields as a leading school of research and education in the eye world, and many ophthalmologists of note in Great Britain, America, and elsewhere look back with affectionate regard to the work they did under Collins’s guidance in the Moorfields laboratory. In 1894 Mr. George Lawson, surgeon oculist to Queen Victoria, was asked to nominate an ophthalmic surgeon to go to Persia to operate on the Shah’s eldest son, and Collins was selected. He married before his departure, and spent his honeymoon in Persia. On his return he wrote an account of his experiences there under the title In the Kingdom of the Shah. He was rewarded for his services with the Order of the Lion and the Sun. Among other results of his experiences was a keen interest in and an extensive knowledge of Persian art, especially carpets and faience. On his return in 1895 he was elected to the staff of the Royal London Ophthalmic Hospital as assistant surgeon. From the time of his appointment as house- surgeon till his death, when he was consulting surgeon and a member of the committee of management of the hospital, a period of forty-eight years elapsed. During the five years following his return from Persia, despite the increasing claims of clinical work on his time, he continued his anatomical and pathological researches, and again the work of these five y^ars was partially summarized in the Erasmus Wilson Lectures delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons in February, 1900, on the anatomy and pathology of the eye. About this time the question of the removal of the Royal London Ophthalmic Hospital from its old site in Moorfields to City Road was under consideration, and Collins, as secretary of the medical board, was much occupied with the consequent arrange¬ ments. A short list of his hospital appointments will serve to show the amount of purely clinical work that he did. In addition to his Moorfields surgeoncy, he was ophthalmic surgeon to Charing Cross Hospital and to the Belgrave Hospital for Children, visiting