Someone once stopped David Abrams at a cashpoint in Baker Street and asked if he would come into Madame Tussauds and have his hands modelled for a waxwork of the sculptor Henry Moore. The Leeds-born eye surgeon was chuffed to be asked to emulate a fellow Yorkshireman, especially a major artist. Perhaps the person looking at his hands had thought he too was a creative type. Sadly, though Abrams’s hands used tiny scissors and tweezers and played boogie-woogie piano and bridge, they were not large enough to be Henry Moore’s, so the model makers moved on. Abrams, known as David, was a consultant ophthalmic surgeon at London’s Royal Free Hospital for 30 years. He wrote volume five of *System of ophthalmology: ophthalmic optics and refraction* (London, Kimpton, 1970) jointly with Sir Stewart Duke-Elder, and revised several later editions of *Duke-Elder’s practice of refraction* (Edinburgh, Churchill Livingstone), long the standard textbook for trainee ophthalmologists. From his first studies in the 1940s, Abrams’ career tracked the evolution of the NHS and saw changes in the small field of ophthalmology that would make it barely recognisable by the time he retired. A generalist who would ply between theatres, clinics and domiciliary visits, and from state hospital to private consulting rooms, with thousands of patients on his lists, he became a rarity as ophthalmologists increasingly became specialists. As a houseman he even took sessions sight testing at opticians’ shops in Welwyn and High Barnet. David did it all: squints, cataracts, glaucoma, retinal detachments, injuries and eye disease in relation to general medicine. As implants and laser surgery replaced hazardous operations, one eye at a time, under general anaesthetic, preservation and restoration of sight became more predictable and recovery times shorter. Patients thanked him for the ability to read the paper or drive again. David Abrams was the son of Maurice Abrams and Tilly Abrams née Ellis, devout Jews whose families had settled in Leeds from Russia at the end of the 19th century. Maurice was a Royal Flying Corps rigger in the First World War and later a salesman. David had one sister, Marlene, 14 years younger. Consistently a year ahead of his peers despite going to three schools in one year when evacuated to Bournemouth in 1939, teenage David was also a promising classical pianist. The call of a musical career was conclusively resisted when, in 1944, he won three state and college awards to read medicine at University College, Oxford. His headmaster said he had never seen a scholarship awarded to a boy so young. He went up to Oxford aged 17. Two first cousins also became medics, brothers Leon Abrams, a cardiothoracic surgeon who developed and implanted the first variable rate pacemaker, and Michael Abrams, deputy chief medical officer of the Department of Health from 1985 to 1992. David was studying for a surgical fellowship in Edinburgh after qualifying at the Middlesex Hospital when he was introduced to Anita Berlyne, a Cambridge-trained psychologist from Manchester. They married in 1954, only for him to be promptly sent off for deferred National Service. Based at the British Military Hospital in Fayid, Egypt, the largest hospital in the Suez Canal zone, as a Royal Army Medical Corps captain, he was a rare eye specialist serving a large Army in Egypt and Libya and tested tens of thousands of eyes. He took his diploma in ophthalmology on his return to London in 1956. The following year, after a brief call back to Egypt for the Suez Crisis, and now a father of one, David was elected one of three residents at Moorfields. At the allied Institute of Ophthalmology he started to publish research and taught postgraduates on glaucoma. Duke-Elder, colossus of the eye world, was then its research director. Having gained his FRCS in 1959, David worked at the new eye unit at Neasden General, Willesden General and Central Middlesex hospitals. He joined the Royal Free Hospital as a consultant in 1964, the year he defended his doctorate in Oxford on ‘The normal and pathological pigment epithelium of the human iris’. He was appointed as an honorary senior lecturer at the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine in 1974. He combined NHS sessions with private practice at 99 Harley Street and at home in Winchmore Hill. Courtesy, modesty and a droll sense of humour marked his dealings with patients, colleagues and students, who enjoyed his unexpected, wicked puns. Despite heading a small specialty, in 1981 he was elected chairman of the Royal Free’s medical executive committee and chairman of the North Camden Health District’s district medical team. In 1982, when the Camden and Islington Health Authority was disbanded, his North Camden role gave him a place on the new Hampstead District Health Authority. The transfer of long stay services into the local community and the development of new services in London teaching hospitals were hot topics. David enjoyed explaining eye issues to a wider readership, flashing literary flair with papers like ‘Who does what in eye disease? A guide and glossary for the gullible’, and a book aimed at generalist colleagues, *Ophthalmology in medicine: an illustrated clinical guide* (London, Dunitz, 1990). In the 90s David saw patients at Harley Street, the St John and St Elizabeth Hospital and the Nuffield Hospital, Enfield, and appeared as an expert witness. Outraged when his pension provider Equitable Life cut guaranteed annuity rates, he joined a class action and went on TV and national newspapers to decry its mismanagement. Legal arguments and the mutual provider’s subsequent collapse affected thousands of independent professionals, including fellow doctors. In a long and fulfilling retirement David tended his beloved north Oxfordshire cottage garden, penned limericks, reprised piano lessons, played weekly bridge at the Savile Club and took pride in his growing family. Shortly before Britain locked down during the Covid 19 pandemic in 2020, David’s family moved him and Anita to residential care. He died from Alzheimer’s disease on 4 November 2022 aged 94 and was survived by Anita, his wife of 68 years, and daughters Susan, Janet, Hester, Wendy and Rachel, five grandchildren and a great-granddaughter. In the final months of his life, Janet, an artist, cast his hands in bronze.