Eye Gift

President Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia University last week made formal though indirect announcement that the university had received another sizeable chunk of the gigantic income of Edward Stephen Harkness. Had Columbia not received it, the U. S. and New York State would have taken it as income taxes. The gift, Mr. Harkness indicated, was to be allocated to the great Medical Center which the university and Presbyterian Hospital have organized in upper Manhattan; and the Medical Center should use it for an Eye Institute.* Pathologists can describe diseased eye conditions. Ophthalmologists can treat and cure a great many of the diseases. But knowledge of the causes of some of those diseases, for example cataract, is hypothetical. Even the physiology of the normal eye is not an exact science. Reason for ophthalmologic inexactness doubtless lies in the nature of the human crowd. Two generations ago the medical crowd herded toward contagious diseases. A generation ago the crowd swerved toward tuberculosis. Currently there are three bright foci of attention--cancer, heart disease, pneumonia. Cancer, through its experts, has made itself the brightest, to the vexation of the heart men, who are impatiently waiting for a cancer cure or a change of public attention. Waiting hopefully in the offing are specialties, as that of the eye. The Medical Center Eye Institute will be an important lighthouse to the medical crowd. A few big beacons like it already exist. Baltimore has the Wilmer Ophthalmological Institute (TIME, Oct. 21, 28, 1929), generally considered the best. Philadelphia has Wills Eye Hospital; Boston, Massachusetts Eye & Ear Infirmary; Chicago, Illinois Eye & Ear Infirmary; New Orleans, Touro Infirmary. Manhattan already has New York Eye & Ear Infirmary, Manhattan Eye, Ear & Throat Hospital. For chief of Mr. Harkness' Medical Center Eye Institute there now was, since Dr. Edgar Steiner Thomson's death last January, one Manhattan certainty. It is always a difficult thing to rate that intangible which is medical standing. Yet by general consent Dr. Thomson, surgeon and director of Manhattan Eye, Ear & Throat Hospital was Manhattan's No. 1 eye man. No. 2, according to the viewpoint and certainly among the first half dozen, was Dr. John Martin Wheeler, 52, Columbia professor of ophthalmology, chief of Medical Center's eye department. He was named the eye institute's director. Dr. Wrheeler is a very serious gentleman. He is not garrulous; and when he talks it is in soft, slow tone. He purses his lips like his fellow Vermonter Calvin Coolidge. He works hard (twelve hours daily). Post graduate students at Columbia and the medical center are awed by him. They know that "to be trained by Wheeler is to be assured of success." He has two distractions from his eye work, and both are of a kind--the farm he recently bought at Underbill, Vt, and the home he is building at Riverdale, N. Y. There is one other, recent accomplishment of Dr. Wheeler's which contributes to his eminence. He removed the cataract from the King of Siam's left eye. Although a cataract removal is a simple operation for a trained eye surgeon, the Royal Siamese case projected Dr. Wheeler in the public mind as a doctor-of-the-year.

* Further additions planned by the Medical Center include institutes for research on ear, nose & throat; orthopedics; contagious diseases; tuberculosis.

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