John Herbert Parsons, 1868-1957

Abstract

John Herbert Parsons died on 7 October 1957, at University College Hospital, London, in his 90th year. He was primarily an ophthalmologist and over a long period of years held a unique position in that specialty. In the latter half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, British ophthalmology maintained the proud position among the countries of the world that it had inherited from Bowman, and its senior representatives were deservedly respected both at home and abroad—Jonathan Hutchinson, Nettleship, Doyne, Marcus Gunn, Treacher Collins, Fisher, Lawford, Paton and others. Among these, Parsons was a junior; but alone among them he grasped the significance of the changes that were at that time becoming apparent in the progress of medicine. They confined their attention to the study of ocular disease as it presented itself in the clinic, or followed up the ruins it left behind in the pathological laboratory; for him the real problem lay in neither of these but rather in an understanding of physiology and biochemistry, his interest was centred not in arranging disease-pictures in neatly docketed pigeon-holes, but in trying to understand the initial aberration from the normal. To a generation which hardly understood, he preached that advances in the treatment of cataract consisted not in the elaboration of operative techniques, but in an understanding of the biochemistry of the lens and its respiratory mechanism; of glaucoma, in the elucidation of the dynamics of the aqueous humour. Establishing himself in the front rank as a clinician in the years before the First World War, he spent the years between the wars striving to maintain the spirit of research in British ophthalmology at a time when it was conspicuously weak, widening the field of visual hygiene by adapting its lessons to industry, and extending his interests to the perceptual and psychological aspects of vision and sensory perception in their widest sense. During this period he dominated British ophthalmology by his great industry, his forceful personality, and his transparent integrity, and at the same time established a considerable reputation in wider scientific circles. And after the Second World War, when he formally opened the Institute of Ophthalmology in London and saw clinical and laboratory research married and set upon a secure basis, he had reason to believe that he had achieved one of the main purposes of his life.