My earliest association with ophthalmology was at the Sunday morning operations at the eye clinics in the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh in 1879 and 1880, my last two years at the University of Edinburgh. There were then two surgeons attached to the ophthalmic wards. Mr. Walker, unknown to fame, was big, inelegant, good natured and short sighted. He appeared even to novices like myself to do what not a few novices unwillingly accomplish in another field of endeavor; that is, he demonstrated perhaps to a critical audience how to do everything one wishes to avoid when striving to make a clean job, keep on the fairway and plump into that elusive little hole by the shortest route possible. Yet the house surgeons stated that his results from the point of view of the patient were as good as those of his famous colleague Mr. Argyll Robertson.
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