Harry Moss Traquair

Over the past 150 years ophthalmic surgeons have constituted a relatively small percentage of the College’s total Fellowship and, although in recent times their numbers have grown significantly, they remain a minor group in comparison with Fellows in the other surgical specialties. Given this numerical imbalance, it is remarkable that of the 64 Fellows who since 1855 have held the College’s highest office, no fewer than seven were ophthalmic surgeons. Their election to the Presidency is a striking testimony to their outstanding personal qualities as well as to their professional distinction and there could be no better example of this than Dr H M Traquair, who was President from 1939 - 1941.

Harry Moss Traquair, born in Edinburgh in 1875, was the son of Ramsay Traquair MD FRS, a distinguished anatomist, zoologist and palaeontologist who was keeper of the Natural History Collections in the Royal Scottish Museum. His mother, Phoebe Traquair, was a highly talented artist and craftswoman, celebrated in her own lifetime as a book illustrator, bookbinder, embroiderer, enamellist and particularly as a mural painter. Her artistic reputation which had faded to some degree in the middle decades of the 20th century has, in recent years, had a triumphant renaissance.

Harry Traquair was educated at the Edinburgh Academy and at Edinburgh University from which, in spite of contracting tuberculosis, he graduated MB, CM with first class honours in 1901. One year later he took the Diploma in Public Health (DPH) and this was followed by a period of postgraduate study at the University of Halle in Germany.
He obtained the degree of Doctor of Medicine (MD) from Edinburgh University in 1903 and in the following year he became a Fellow of the College. For health reasons he then went to South Africa and spent some three and a half years as a general practitioner in the Orange Free State.

Having decided to devote himself to Ophthalmology, he returned to Edinburgh and was in due course appointed Assistant Ophthalmic Surgeon to the Royal Infirmary, to Leith Hospital and to the Edinburgh Eye Dispensary. At the same time he established himself in consultant practice and through his clinical and scientific publications acquired over the next few years a national reputation in his specialty. His foremost clinical and research interests lay in neuro-ophthalmology and for his work in this field he received a number of important awards, including the Middlemore Prize (1920), the Nettleship Medal (1922) and the Doyne Memorial Medal (1923).

In 1927 Traquair was appointed ophthalmic surgeon in charge of wards in the Royal Infirmary and also Lecturer in Diseases of the Eye in Edinburgh University. It was a member of the University’s Senatus Academicus from 1932 to 1941 and served on the University Court from 1941 to 1949. His famous monograph, “An Introduction to Clinical Perimetry”, first published in 1927, ran to six editions and embodies the results of painstaking observations and investigations extending over many years. It became a world classic in a branch of ophthalmology with which the name of Traquair will always be associated.

He had for long been involved in College affairs and in 1939 was elected President; he held office over the first two years of World War II and it would be impossible to exaggerate the value to the College of his guidance and leadership at that difficult time. He was due to retire from the staff of the Royal Infirmary in 1940 but because of the absence on military service of younger colleagues, he was asked to continue in charge of wards and did so until 1943.

In 1943 and 1944 Traquair was President of the Ophthalmological Society of the United Kingdom and a member of the Council of the Faculty of Ophthalmologists. In 1948 he published another book “Clinical Ophthalmology for Practitioners and Students” which was well received and provided a popular, simple guide to its subject for the readership at which it was aimed.

Harry Traquair died in 1954 after a long and distressing illness which he bore with great fortitude. His contributions to neuro-ophthalmology were of the utmost importance and he could have no better epitaph than the words of Professor Norman Dott. “A man gifted with a powerful intellect, he had wide interests in biology and philosophy. These he focussed on his chosen work as a clinical oculist and as an ophthalmological research scientist ……. a man exemplifying scientific integrity and comradeship, he was recognised and respected as an acknowledged authority on neurological aspects of ophthalmology or visual aspects of neurology throughout the world.”