Calbert Inglis Phillips was a professor of ophthalmology at the University of Edinburgh. An only son of the manse, he was born in Glasgow on 20 March 1925, the son of the Rev David Horner Phillips and Margaret Calbert Phillips née Inglis. The family moved to Aberdeen in 1938 and the young Phillips attended Robert Gordon’s College, where he studied Latin and Greek (originally intending to follow his father into the ministry). He went on to Aberdeen University where, in 1946, aged just 21, he graduated in medicine. His first year had been hard catching up on physics and chemistry, but was rescued by freestyling in the swimming and water polo teams. Phillips was attracted to ophthalmology because of the small scale of the microsurgery, combined with its neurological, medical and genetic interest. Having first served in the Royal Army Medical Corps (from 1947 to 1949) and obtained a diploma in public health at Edinburgh University (in 1950), Phillips’s residency was at Moorfields. He was then a senior registrar at St Thomas’ Hospital and a research assistant at the glaucoma clinic at the Institute of Ophthalmology. From 1958 to 1963 he was a consultant at Bristol Royal Infirmary, a period which included an instructive year (from 1960 to 1961) at Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary in Boston to learn about retinal detachments. His surgical visit to Edinburgh’s department of ophthalmology in January 1962 was more auspicious still, as it was there that he met the registrar, Anne Fulton; they married in December 1962. In 1965, Phillips was appointed to the new chair in ophthalmology at the University of Manchester but, in 1972, took the high road back to his beloved native Scotland to the Forbes chair at Edinburgh University combined with clinical and surgical duties at the Princess Alexandra Eye Pavilion, retiring in 1990. He was chairman of the European Association for Eye Research from 1975 to 1977. Important ‘firsts’ included: elucidation of the mechanism of closed-angle glaucoma; that ‘normal pressure glaucoma’ is an artefact of indentation (Schiotz) tonometry applied to large (myopic) eyes; that ocular hypertension could often be explained by small eyes; and being the prime mover in motivating the first mapping of a retinal dystrophy to a site within the X chromosome. A eureka moment that benefitted patients with glaucoma was Phillips’ discovering the ocular hypotensive properties of an early beta-adrenergic blocking drug, which eventually led to the pharmaceutical revolution of glaucoma treatment with eye drops. The second edition of his *Logic in medicine* (London, BMJ Publishing, 1995) included chapters by two statisticians, Gore and Spiegelhalter. Calbert’s interest in statistics, piqued by his diploma in public health, was evident in analytical studies that he published in the *British Journal of Ophthalmology* in the late 1950s on strabismus and anisometropia and on the sectoral distribution of goniosynechiae. These studies predated his later randomised controlled trials of treatments for glaucoma. Outside medicine, his recreations were generally energetic, from sailing and skiing to tree-planting and hill-walking (especially in his beloved Deeside). Phillips died from aortic stenosis and respiratory infection on 28 February 2023 at the age of 97. He was survived by Anne, his wife of 60 years, their son, Andrew, and granddaughters Lucy and Chloe.