Harold Ridley (ophthalmologist)
[2] He was educated at Charterhouse School before studying at Pembroke College, Cambridge from 1924 to 1927, and completed his medical training in 1930 at St Thomas' Hospital.
[8] Ridley was in civilian hospital services in South East England during the early years of World War II, when he saw injured pilots from the Battle of Britain.
In the middle - to end-years of the war he was with the R.A.M.C (Royal Army Medical Corps) and was posted to West Africa and South East Asia.
While in Africa, Ridley led important research[9] into onchocerciasis when he was stationed in the Gold Coast, now Ghana, for part of his war service.
He acted as part-time sanitation officer at the capital city of Accra, and met Brigadier G. M. Findlay, AMS, who stimulated Ridley's interest to study River Blindness, an endemic disease in parts of the country.
To find onchocerciasis patients, in February 1944, Ridley left the coastal city and travelled overland with Findlay and Captain John Holden to north west Ghana.
He worked in Funsi in the Wa East District of the Upper West Region for two weeks, examining patients with a slit-lamp which ran off two 6-volt car batteries.
The Burma theatre of war permitted the first large population study of individuals with nutritional amblyopia: a total of over 500 within his region of whom about 200 he personally examined and treated.
From the outset it was international in its membership, and set itself a parental and advisory role for the then-nascent national societies to develop in each country for intraocular implant surgeons.
In April 1999, at the annual meeting of the American Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgery in Seattle, Washington, Ridley was honoured in a special anniversary session as one of the most outstanding and influential ophthalmologists of the 20th century.
This Millennium Honour was the culmination of years of lobbying work by Ridley's biographer (David J Apple) and prominent surgeon friends such as Emanuel Rosen and Thomas Neuhann, together with leaders of the ophthalmic medical device industry such as Donald J Munro, chairman and managing director of the Rayner company of Brighton & Hove, UK.
Designed by Howard Brown, the 67p stamp depicted artificial lens implant surgery pioneered by Sir Harold Ridley 1949.
[citation needed] In 2013, a biographical profile of Ridley was included in a book called Saving Sight: An eye surgeon's look at life behind the mask and the heroes who changed the way we see, by Andrew Lam.
[20] On 6 January 2016, during the BBC 1 television programme The One Show a short film was shown about the link between Gordon Cleaver and Harold Ridley.
Using archive film and photographic material and an interview with Sir Harold's son, Nicholas, Michael Mosley reported on the "Eureka moment" that led to the invention of the intraocular lens.
