Harry Brown and I go back to 1971. I first met him when he came by Sansum Clinic looking into establishing an ophthalmology practice in Santa Barbara. I recall asking him at that time what his hobbies were. He replied without a pause, “Mankind.” I didn’t know what he meant then, but I know now. He was a visionary, and he indeed made changes that affected “mankind.”
Harry had just completed an around-the-world trip to South Africa, India, and Afghanistan, where he explored the needs that his knowledge as an ophthalmic surgeon might somehow modify. He once told me that the trip had been done on borrowed money and “vapors.” The third-world tour was part of his postdoctoral fellowship at UCLA’s Jules Stein Eye Institute, and his mother, wife, and four children accompanied him. Earlier in his education, Harry had taken a degree in chemistry at the University of Missouri, served in the U.S. Navy during the Korean War, and then graduated from George Washington University School of Medicine in 1959. He interned at the naval hospital at Camp Pendleton and the medical division of the Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Studies.
For Harry, in many of the disadvantaged sites he visited, surgically curable blindness stood out as a significant untreated affliction. There were various causes, but the outstanding one was advanced cataracts — cataracts so dense in both eyes that the person could see only shadows and white glare.
