In 1837 Queen Victoria gave the hospital in Lower Moorfields its Royal Charter. In 1816, renowned army surgeon George James Guthrie founded the Royal Westminster Ophthalmic Hospital in Mayfair and, in 1843, a third London eye hospital, the Central London Ophthalmic Hospital, was founded by a ‘few zealous gentlemen’ in Bloomsbury. A few months after Saunders had obtained funding for the dispensary, a similar institution opened in the West End of London. The land was cheap and the new infirmary cost only £5,500 to complete.Īlthough Saunders’ decision to found an institution solely dedicated to eyes was a brave one, he was not the only person in the early 19th century to do so. When the hospital moved in 1822 to a purpose-built building in Lower Moorfields, close to what is now Liverpool Street station, it was renamed the London Ophthalmic Infirmary. The original dispensary for Curing Diseases of the Eye and Ear opened at 40, Charterhouse Square in West Smithfield on 25 March 1805.

With the epidemic as an impetus, and coupled with the encouragement of the influential London surgeon Astley Cooper, John Cunningham Saunders founded the first hospital in the world devoted to the treatment of eye disease in October 1804. That all changed in the early 1800s as many soldiers returned from the Napoleonic wars suffering with trachoma.

At the beginning of the 19th century, ophthalmology was an unknown science – historically the treatment of eye disease was the domain of itinerant quacks and charlatans.

Beginning of asepsis year