Having become a Fellow of the College of Surgeons in 1844, Mr. Bowman in 1846 joined the staff of the Royal London Ophthalmic Hospital, Moorfields, as assistant-surgeon, having already made extensive researches into the minute structure of all the organs of special sense. His advent to the Moorfields Hospital was marked by the delivery, in 1847, of a series of lectures on the “Parts Concerned in Operations on the Eye,” which were afterwards separately published. It was evident that ophthalmic surgery had gained a distinguished recruit. Mr. Bowman had, independently of Brücke, discovered the ciliary muscle, and his work brought forward numerous other facts of structure for the first time. His paper “On the Structure of the Vitreous Body,” contributed to the Dublin Quarterly Journal of Medical Science, also attracted good attention. His suggestions on operations for artificial pupil in the Medical Times and Gazette also showed conspicuous capacity for ophthalmic surgery.
Although much urged to devote himself exclusively to this branch of practice, Mr. Bowman preferred to continue in general surgical practice for many years, attaining the surgeoncy to King’s College Hospital in 1856, two years after he had reached the full surgeoncy at Moorfields. In 1848 he had been conjoined with Dr. Todd in the professorship of physiology and general and morbid anatomy in King’s College, retaining the professorship, after Dr. Todd’s retirement, in conjunction with Dr. Beale. But by 1855 Mr. Bowman found himself so fully occupied that he finally resigned the professorship. He held the surgeoncy to King’s College Hospital till 1862.
From this period Mr. Bowman has been the acknowledged leader of ophthalmic practice. He was one of the first to employ the ophthalmoscope. His numerous papers in the Ophthalmic Hospital Reports and in the Medico-Chirurgical Transactions have given particulars of many improvements in operations on the eye, which he has adopted, introduced, or improved. Lachrymal obstructions, glaucoma, conical cornea, and cataract are among the subjects he has specially dealt with; and he has by his clinical teaching and operative example contributed not a little to the building up of modern ophthalmic surgery. The well-earned honour of a baronetcy was conferred upon him in 1884.
The breadth of Sir William Bowman’s sympathies is shown on the one hand by the active part he took in the establishment in 1848 of the St. John’s House Sisterhood for training nurses for hospitals, families, and the poor, having joined its council from the beginning, and having materially assisted Miss Florence Nightingale in her various philanthropic nursing enterprises; and, on the other hand, by his consistent advocacy of physiological experiment. He considers that every step forwards in our knowledge of the healthy body must lead to a better understanding of disease and an improvement of our power of counteracting it, whether in the way of prevention, alleviation, or cure.
In his address to the British Medical Association at Chester in 1866,[23] this eminent authority took occasion to protest forcibly against the imputation of cruelty to animals sometimes made against medical men in respect of physiological experiments. He insisted both on the excessive difficulty of these original inquiries and the high motives which actuate physiologists and the higher class of scientific inquirers. “There should be no doubt,” said he, “as to the free allowance of dissections of living creatures for the advancement, and also for the communication, of a knowledge so indispensable for our race, and for every generation of it.” He practically charged the opponents of vivisection with stopping the gates of knowledge, neither going in themselves nor suffering those that were entering to go in.
The lofty view which Sir William Bowman takes of the surgeon’s function may be gathered from an extract from the above-mentioned address. “I see no reason to doubt that future ages will still accept the pious saying of one of old, that surgery is the Hands of God; the Human Hands, apt images and reflex of man’s whole being, from his morning hour of puling helplessness, when the
“... tender palm is prest
Against the circle of the breast;”
through all his working day of time, until they shall be upraised once more at last in joy and adoration, to hail a brighter and an eternal dawning; the Human Hands, permitted now, through insight into God’s laws, to be His instruments of succour to that earthly life and organisation which His power, wisdom, and love have first brought into being, still alone both sustain and cause to perish when their part is played; to that material organisation which dies every hour it lives, which indeed dies by living, and lives by dying, and which wondrously transmits ever its own prerogatives and dark secrets to a succeeding life, destined apparently to remain a marvel and a mystery impenetrable to all generations.”
The career of Mr. R. Brudenell Carter is of special interest, owing to the fact that he was a general practitioner in the country till the age of forty, and came to London in 1868 without friends or connection, intending to establish himself as a specialist in eye diseases, and in a few years attained to eminence. But Mr. Carter’s life had been previously marked by energy and success of no common order; and his literary tastes and accomplishments ranked in the forefront of the causes of his success.