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Sir Harold Ridley, 94, dies
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Sir Harold Ridley, inventor of the intraocular lens, has died at the age of 94.
Born July 10, 1906, Mr. Ridley became a consultant surgeon at London’s prestigious Moorfield’s Eye Hospital when he was only 32 years old. It was there and at St. Thomas’s Hospital that he began implanting his own design of intraocular lens.
On July 9, 1951, Mr. Ridley announced his work, telling the Oxford Ophthalmological Congress that removal of a cloudy human lens "is but half way to a cure which is complete only when the lost portion is replaced." He then presented for examination some of his own patients whose lenses had been replaced with artificial implants.
Some of his colleagues were interested, others refused even to look. One of the skeptics was the influential Sir Stewart Duke-Elder, who soon embodied the profession’s opposition to IOLs.
Mr. Ridley’s invention would remain highly controversial through the time of his retirement from Britain’s National Health Service in 1971. Addressing the annual meeting of the European Intraocular Implantlens Council in 1986, he recalled the damage it did to his career.
“All you people have enjoyed your implant work, I'm sure,” he said. “I suffered from it.” But by then opinion had turned, and in that same year Mr. Ridley was elected to the Royal Society.
Throughout 1999 and 2000, ophthalmologists worldwide marked the 50th year of IOL implantation with tributes to Mr. Ridley. A long campaign by colleagues to obtain a knighthood was finally successful on September 2, 2000.
Mr. Ridley died May 25 and is survived by his wife, Elisabeth, their daughter and two sons.