Consultant ophthalmic surgeon to University College Hospital and Moorfields Eye Hospital, Cyril Dee Shapland distinguished his career in the 1950s by pioneering new procedures using diathermy and cryosurgery in the treatment of detachment of the retina. Years earlier, in 1929 he assisted Sir William

Albert Boswell Nutt was born in Sheffield on 7 July 1898, the only son of Ernest Smith Nutt. He had the essential virtue of humility, particularly in his approach to the treatment of his patients, following the classical tradition of relating their ophthalmological state to the whole body condition.