Gerard William Crock was professor of ophthalmology at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He was born in Perth in 1929 and was educated with his twin brother Henry (known as Harry) at St Louis Jesuit School in Perth. Both brothers went on to study dentistry at the University of Western Australia, but after two years decided to transfer to the medical course at Melbourne University, where they became resident students at Newman College. (Harry Crock went on to become a distinguished orthopaedic surgeon.) After qualifying in 1953, Gerard Crock studied ophthalmology at Moorfields Hospital in London and at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. In 1963 he was appointed as the inaugural University of Melbourne Ringland Anderson professor of ophthalmology, named after Joseph Ringland Anderson, a leading ophthalmologist at the Alfred Hospital. This was the first chair of ophthalmology in Australia and the second in the British Commonwealth. At the same time, Crock became the director of the retina unit at the Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital. He pioneered ophthalmic microsurgery in Australia and developed new techniques for vitreoretinal surgery and corneal grafting. With Jean-Marie Parel, a young Swiss scientist and biomedical engineer, Crock developed several surgical instruments, including the Schultz-Crock binocular indirect ophthalmoscope, the first to be mounted on a spectacle frame. A later enhanced model incorporated Galilean telescopes to invert the image and make retinal surgery easier. He also helped establish the Kooyong low vision clinic in the HM Lightfoot Centre of the Association for the Blind, which opened in 1973, and was one of the first clinics in the world to cater for the needs of people with residual vision. Gerard Crock was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia in 1985 in recognition of his services to medicine, and in 1990 he was made a Knight of the Order of St John for his work for the St John Eye Hospital in Jerusalem. Gerard William Crock died on 23 December 2007. He was 78 and had been suffering from cancer.