E. Treacher Collins : obituary.

Date:: [1933]

Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

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

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intervals before the war, were begun. It was soon found that the difficulties in the way of the resumption of the normal Congresses were too great and, in place of an International Congress, a Con¬ vention of English-speaking Ophthalmologists was held in London in 1925. For that occasion, Collins, for the second time, became President of the Ophthalmological Society and much of the success of the Convention was due to the gracious way in which he conducted the business of the meeting. Few who were present at the Banquet in the Guildhall, when the Duke of Connaught was the Guest of Honour, will forget the charm and grace of the Chairman’s speech. It w7as during that meeting that Collins was asked to select a small committee of five to try to arrange for a true International Congress. Only the few who formed that committee can know the amount of work that he did to ensure its success. As a result of its work and of the most valuable co-operation of Professor van der Hoeve, a meeting was held at Scheveningen in 1927 attended by 50 delegates representing 25 different nationalities, and, though Collins’s small committee looked forward with some trepidation to the meeting, nothing could have gone more smoothly. At the conclusion of the meeting at Scheveningen, when the International Council of Ophthalmologists was formed, Collins was elected bv universal acclamation Honorary President of the Council, and so took his place beside Bowman, von Graefe, Bonders and Fuchs as a leader in International O p h th al mol ogy. In 1931 he was awarded the Mackenzie Medal and took as the subject of his address “The Physiology of Weeping.” This was published in our columns) last year. He was an Honorary Member of the American Medical Association, of the Copenhagen Medical Societv, the Egyptian Ophthalmological Society and the Hungarian Ophthalmological Society. It is impossible to ennumerate here all the contributions of Treacher Collins to the literature of Ophthalmology. There are over 100 original papers of varying size in the Transactions of the Oph¬ thalmological Society alone, apart from innumerable contributions to discussions, and very frequently Collins’s remarks in a discussion were of much greater value than the paper that gave rise to them. In the Moorfields Reports, there are more than 20 papers of value. Others appeared in the Transactions of the Section of Ophthalmology of the Royal Society of Medicine, in the British Medical Journal and in the Lancet. Together with Mayou, he published the well-known book on “The Pathology of the Eye” which has recentlv gone into a second edition, and in 1929 he published “The History and Traditions of the Moorfields Eye Hospital.”