Charles Brown was a consultant ophthalmic surgeon in Bristol. He was born in Aberdeen on 10 July 1915 into a medical family - his father, John Brown, and uncle were both general practitioners, both his sisters married doctors, one sister and a daughter became nurses, and his son-in-law was professor of medicine at UCH. His mother Charlotte Jane, née Thomson, was a teacher. He was educated at Aberdeen Grammar School and Aberdeen University, where he won a bronze medal in anatomy, and was much influenced by Dugald Baird, the obstetrician, Sir Stanley Davidson and Sir James Learmonth. After junior posts he joined the RAMC, where he worked under Sir Benjamin Rycroft in Italy, and later with Sir Henry Holland in India, in his Shikarpur Eye Camp in Sind. After the war he continued to work under Rycroft at Moorfields and under Keith Lyle at King's. Later he was a registrar at the Bristol Eye Hospital, where he was appointed consultant in 1951. His main interests were in postnatal cataracts in premature infants, and from 1951 to 1980 he examined the eyes of every underweight baby for retrolental fibroplasias. Later he became interested in intra-ocular implants after cataract extraction. On retirement, he took up a post as locum consultant to the St John of God Hospital, Perth, Australia, where he stayed for the next ten years. In 1943, he married Vera Mary Dingley, who taught physics at Aberdeen University and later at Badminton School, Bristol. They had three sons, David, Peter and Andrew, and three daughters, Alison, Rosemary and Angela. He died on 26 March 2002.