John Parsons

Sir John Herbert Parsons CBE FRS FRCS (3 September 1863, Bristol – 7 October 1957, University College Hospital, London) was a British ophthalmologist and ophthalmic surgeon.

Education Parsons was educated at the University of Bristol, University College London, and at St Bartholomew's Hospital. He received in 1890 his BSc in physiology, in 1891 his MRCS, and in 1892 his MB.

Parsons served on various government committees dealing with vision tests, blindness prevention, and proper lighting in factories. During World War I he was a consultant ophthalmological surgeon with the rank of Colonel, Army Medical Service, for which he was awarded Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 1919 Birthday Honours. From 1928 to 1932 he was a member of the Medical Research Council.

... One of the band of great clinical leaders who retained for ophthalmology in this country at the end of the last and the beginning of the present century the proud position it inherited fifty years previously from Sir William Bowman—Nettleship, Doyne, Gunn, Collins, Fisher, Lawford, Paton, and others—he outstripped them all in intellectual brilliance and force of character. ... Alone among them he realized that advances in ophthalmology did not lie solely in the clinic or in the pathological laboratory, that a new age was emerging wherein clinical pictures were to be interpreted in terms of physiology, physics, and chemistry; and he had the energy and ability to follow out his convictions. ... 1922 — Knighthood 1925 — Bowman Lectureship 1929 — honoured guest at the opening of the Wilmer Eye Institute in the United States 1936 — Howe Medal of the American Academy of Ophthalmology and Otolaryngology 1936–1938 — President of the Royal Society of Medicine

Selected works

(Volumes 1 to 4, published from 1904 to 1908)