John Argyll Robertson followed two older brothers, Robert and William, in studying medicine as undergraduates in Edinburgh, and, like William, specialised in surgery. He presented his thesis for the Doctor of Medicine degree in 1819, on Ophthalmia. In thirty-three pages of Latin he describes inflammation of the anterior segment of the eye suggesting possible causes and discussing the limited available methods of treatment. One section is devoted to Ophthalmia Aegyptiaca, a relic of ophthalmic problems encountered during military activities against the Emperor Napoleon in Egypt and the Iberian Peninsula. The thesis is dedicated to John Henry Wishart, a surgeon at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, who was president of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh in 1820. In 1822 Robertson was apprenticed as a surgeon to Wishart and in the same year they founded the Edinburgh Eye Dispensary, the first specialist ophthalmic hospital in Scotland, with premises in the Lawnmarket.
After graduation in Medicine Robertson submitted his Probationary Essay on the Anatomy and Physiology of the Eye, dedicated to the Reverend George Home “as a mark of affection and esteem” to become a Fellow of the College. In it he questions the view of Majendie that tears enter the lacrimal drainage passages under gravity, and proposes capillary attraction as a mechanism. He makes the observation that the physiological blind spot corresponds to the optic disc, and refers to the concept of corresponding points in the retinae, disputing the proposition that double vision is avoided by each eye being used separately. He concludes that because persons who have had the crystalline lens extracted are able to see both near and distant objects clearly, accommodation takes place at the cornea.
In his Remarks on Iritis, while affirming that it is not possible ( as now) to establish a cause in most cases, he lists possible aetiological factors. These included mercury (a commonly used treatment), exposure to cold, surgical or accidental injury and syphilis. He went on to describe treatment such as bloodletting, blistering, mercury, belladonna and purgatives. Yet he was also a general surgeon publishing on cholera and a case of rupture of a carotid aneurism. As a general and ophthalmic surgeon he was appointed to the Surgical Department of the Royal Infirmary in 1838, a post he held till 1842.
His Observations on the extraction and displacement of the cataract, a review of the literature on cataract treatment, in 1836 describes three modes: division, or capsulotomy, extraction by an extracapsular method and displacement, by depression or reclination of the intact lens transsclerally. Quoting the failure rates of the greatest practitioners of the time he totals 30% by extraction and 17.5% by displacement, his own figure for displacement being 9.5%. His own causes of failure are suppuration, atrophy of the eyeball and obliteration of the pupil, reflections of a high sepsis rate and the poor instrumentation available. He thus recommends the older method of displacement before the more modern method of lens extraction which later became the norm with improved knowledge and techniques.
A Curator of the College museum, he resigned on being elected President of the College in 1848 but he had served less than one year when he became ill and declined to stand for re-election, being succeeded by Professor James Syme. During his short Presidential term the College supported the case of assistant surgeons in the Royal Navy who sought the rank of Ward Room Officer on grounds that “midshipmen and cadets were of inferior age and education, unsuitable and unimproving companions”, and because the surgeons were “deprived of the necessary facilities for uninterrupted study vis a vis those in the Army in order to keep pace with the rapid march of medical sciences”. The College petitioned the House of Commons on behalf of these surgeons. Also during his presidency the premises behind the Playfair hall were purchased and converted for teaching. There was a proposal to amalgamate with the Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow which failed.
Little of a personal nature is recorded of the man, resident of Queen Street, father of three sons who practised medicine, of whom the most famed is Douglas who followed his father’s ophthalmic footsteps. We might assume that like him he was a golfer because he retired to Rose Park in St Andrews, now an old people’s home, where he died in January 1855 when the news of the defeat of the Russians at the siege of Sebastopol filled the newspapers.
