Main description:

The Manchester Institution for Curing Diseases of the Eye, one of the earliest eye hospitals in the world, opened its doors in 1814 in a small house in King Street, Manchester. A single doctor dealt with over 1,800 patients in its first year, but was able to offer only crude treatments with unpredictable outcomes. There were no anaesthetics, no antibiotics and few antiseptics. But there were leeches. Over the ensuing two centuries enormous improvements in instruments, medicines and technology, some of them pioneered by the hospital, have transformed ophthalmology into the most high-tech of medical specialties. Two hundred years after its creation, the Manchester Royal Eye Hospital, as it is now known, is one of the world's foremost eye hospitals, its 425 staff treating over 200,000 people each year to the highest levels of medical and surgical skill, using technology that our forebears could not dream of. This book tells the story of the Hospital, of the people who created it, led it and worked in it, and of those it treated, setting its history in the context of the great city in which it was born, and has flourished.