A reference to Mr. Carter’s ancestry will show that good hereditary influences met and combined in him. His father was a major in the royal marines; his grandfather, rector of Little Wittenham in Berkshire, was a younger brother of Elizabeth Carter, the well-known poetess and translator of Epictetus, whose portrait by Lawrence is in the National Portrait Gallery. The rector was entirely educated by his learned sister till he went to Cambridge. The rector’s wife was a granddaughter of John Wallis, the mathematician and astronomer, one of the founders of the Royal Society. The Carters belonged to the younger branch of a family which had held the manor of St. Columb Major in Cornwall from the time of Henry VII.
Mr. Carter was born, at Little Wittenham on October 2, 1828. After being at private schools he commenced his professional education by apprenticeship to a general practitioner, and afterwards entered at the London Hospital. After becoming a member of the College of Surgeons in 1851 he practised for a short time at Leytonstone and at Putney.
At this period Mr. Carter published his first work “On the Pathology and Treatment of Hysteria” (1853). This was avowedly based to a considerable extent upon the opinions and practice of Mr. Stephen Mackenzie, then recently deceased, who was extensively known by his successful treatment of the most inveterate hysterical disorders. This work in itself sufficiently indicated the presence of a writer possessing both clearness of view and moderation of statement.
This was followed by a much more extensive treatise “On the Influence of Education and Training in Preventing Diseases of the Nervous System” (1855). Mr. Carter was led to write it by observing the frequent connection between faulty education and nervous or mental disorders. It is divided into three parts, dealing respectively with the Nervous System, Physical Education, and Moral Education. The latter was that for the sake of which the book was written; it displays a thoughtful moderation and breadth of view, without, however, forecasting the author’s future eminence.
Immediately upon the completion of this book Mr. Carter started for the Crimea, where he served with the army as staff-surgeon. Returning home when peace was concluded, he settled in Nottinghamshire, and soon moving into the town of Nottingham, took an active part in the establishment of an eye hospital there. In 1862 he removed to Stroud in Gloucestershire, and founded an eye hospital in Gloucester. In 1864 Mr. Carter became Fellow of the College of Surgeons by examination.
In 1868 Mr. Carter took the important step of removing to London, resolving to rely upon medical and other literary work mainly until practice should come. Thus Mr. Carter has been the writer of very voluminous contributions to journalism, and has shown great ease and lucidity of style. In 1869 he was appointed Surgeon to the Royal South London Ophthalmic Hospital, and in 1870 Ophthalmic Surgeon to St. George’s Hospital. He has persevered in commenting severely upon errors of modern education, and has especially dealt with evils done in various ways to the eyes in modern life. One pamphlet of his, “On the Artificial Production of Stupidity in Schools,” has been often reprinted. In an address at the opening of the Medical Session at St. George’s in 1873 Mr. Carter thus spoke of cramming: “The show pupils, who furnish marvellous answers to a multiplicity of questions, on a multiplicity of subjects, in response to the demands of various preliminary or matriculation examinations, remind me of nothing so much as of the wooden cannon which artillerymen call ‘Quakers,’ which require for their production in unlimited numbers, besides the blocks of wood, nothing but a turning-lathe and a paint-brush; and which are mounted, to deceive the enemy, in embrasures that would otherwise be vacant.... But our ‘competition wallahs,’ instead of being used to deceive an enemy, have been used chiefly to deceive ourselves.”
In 1875 Mr. Carter published an extended and important “Practical Treatise on Diseases of the Eye.” In this he distinctly states that in its normal condition the eye has faults which would condemn a telescope or microscope to be thrown aside as useless, but which in the living organ are neutralised by the conditions under which it is exerted. He recommends any one who would operate upon the eye to take a great deal of preliminary trouble, and to train his hands to especial delicacy of action, so that he shall be indifferent which he uses. “It has more than once been my lot,” he says, “to see attempts to operate upon the human eye made by a surgeon who did not even know how to hold the instruments he was about to misuse; and I can conceive few things more painful than such a spectacle.” “In all ages and countries the bad workman has complained of his tools, and the good workman has produced the most varied results by the most simple means. A man who is very awkward, and whose awkwardness is perpetually bringing him to grief, hits upon a contrivance by which he hopes that this natural result may in some degree be obviated. He calls his contrivance an invention; and, like those persons of whom it is said that their glory is in their shame, he is often somewhat proud of it. Many surgeons of great and deserved repute have invented each a single instrument, such as Beer’s knife or Tyrrell’s hook; and some have invented more than one, chiefly because they have struck out some new procedure for which new appliances were indispensable. But as a rule the invention of many instruments by a surgeon may be accepted as a sufficient proof of his clumsiness; and when, without valid reason, any single operator has his peculiar scissors, and his peculiar hook, and his peculiar forceps, and his peculiar scoop, all called after his name, it is more than probable that the gift of fingers has not been bestowed upon him.”
Mr. Carter in 1877 gave a course of lectures “on Defects of Vision which are Remediable by Optical Appliances,” as Hunterian Professor of Pathology and Surgery at the College of Surgeons. These were published in the same year. He has since issued a more popular work, “Eyesight—Good and Bad: a Treatise on the Exercise and Preservation of Vision,” 1880. The following extract has to do with a very injurious form of prejudice due to ignorance.
“The persons who suffer most from popular prejudice and ignorance on the subject of spectacles are men of the superior artisan class, who are engaged on work which requires good eyesight, and who, at the age of fifty or sixty, find their power of accomplishing such work is diminishing. It is a rule in many workshops that spectacles are altogether prohibited, the masters ignorantly supposing them to be evidences of bad sight; whereas the truth is that they are not evidences of bad sight at all, but only of the occurrence of a natural and inevitable change, the effects of which they entirely obviate, leaving the sight as good for all purposes as it ever was.” His general interest in education and its effects is abundantly manifested as in the description of the late Mr. C. Paget’s half-time experiment at Ruddington near Nottingham, where garden work was substituted for about half the ordinary school hours of a portion of the scholars. The children so treated were found after a short period altogether to outstrip in their schoolwork those who devoted, or were supposed to devote, twice as much time to it.
Mr. Carter has translated two valuable works bearing on his specialty: viz., Zander on the Ophthalmoscope, and Scheffler on Ocular Defects. He has contributed to “Our Homes, and How to Make them Healthy,” to the Sydenham Society’s Biennial Retrospect of Medicine, and to many other publications.