Name Walter Jessop | Role Surgeon | |
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Walter Hamilton Hylton Jessop FRCS (1853–1917), Hunterian Professor of comparative anatomy and physiology (1887-8), Ophthalmic Surgeon (to the Western General Dispensary, the Foundling Hospital and to the Children's Hospital at Paddington Green), Senior Ophthalmic Surgeon to St Bartholomew's Hospital (1901), President of the Ophthalmological Society of the United Kingdom (1915–17) and someone who ‘made a unique position for himself in the ophthalmological world and was probably the best known of English ophthalmic surgeons to his brethren on the Continent of Europe’.
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Early life and education
Jessop was born in 1853, the son of Walter Jessop, a surgeon, from Cheltenham. He was educated at Bedford Modern School and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge (Matric. Michs. 1872; Tancred Scholar, 1872; B.A. 1876; M.B. and M.A. 1886).
Career
Jessop joined the staff of St Bartholomew's Hospital (1882). He was an assistant, then Senior Demonstrator in anatomy at St Bartholomew's Hospital (1882–94), Hunterian Professor of comparative anatomy and physiology (1887-8) and then Ophthalmic Surgeon to the Western General Dispensary; to the Foundling Hospital, and to the Children's Hospital at Paddington Green. He was made Senior Ophthalmic Surgeon at St Bartholomew's Hospital in 1901.
Jessop was President of the Ophthalmological Society of the United Kingdom (1915–17) and made an exhaustive research on the action of cocaine on the eye. ‘He made a unique position for himself in the ophthalmological world and was probably the best known of English ophthalmic surgeons to his brethren on the Continent of Europe.’ He was made a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1880 and a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1884.
Jessop was an author (Manual on Diseases of the Eye (2nd ed., 1908); Manual of Ophthalmic Surgery and Medicine, etc.) and in his latter years assisted in arranging a British Journal of Ophthalmology. He was a J.P. for Berkshire and died on 16 February 1917.