Evarts Ambrose Graham (1883-1957), doyen of pulmonary surgeons.

Evarts Graham performed the first successful pneumonectomy in 1933. Evarts Ambrose Graham, the son of a Scotch Irish surgeon, was born on 19 March 1883. After early schooling in Chicago, he graduated at Princeton and returned to Chicago to study Medicine, taking his MD at Rush Medical College in 1907. The chemical aspects of pathological changes then occupied him fully until 1919, when he was appointed full-time professor of surgery at the Washington School of Medicine in St Louis. Visualisation of gallstones temporarily took his attention, but bronchogenic carcinoma was seldom far from his thoughts, and he recognised (too late to save himself) the causative association with cigarette smoking by 1950. He died on 4 March 1957.

Franciscus Cornelis Donders (1818-1889).

Franciscus Cornelis Donders was educated at Duizel and Boxmeer before entering the Military Medical School and the medical faculty at Utrecht University in 1835. In 1840, he received his MD from Leiden and spent 2 years in practice at Vlissingen before returning to Utrecht, where he was appointed as an extraordinary professor to lecture on forensic medicine, anthropology, general biology and ophthalmology. Refraction by the eye is complex, since the ray of light passes through many changes of refractive index in its path, and Donders simplified the account of the process by establishing an equivalent refractive system: the reduced eye. When Donders opened an Eye Hospital in 1858, he devoted himself to clinical ophthalmology, making fundamental advances in providing spectacles to correct errors of refraction-which he separated from errors of accommodation. In 1862, Donders was promoted as an ordinary professor at Utrecht and he handed over the greater part of his practice to his pupil Hermann Snellen. From narrow specialisation, Donders was freed to return to the broader physiology; subatmospheric pressure in the pleura was for a while referred to as 'Donders' pressure'; he also devised a method of measuring the mental reaction time taken in making discrimination, rather than the simple reaction time in which no choice is involved. He was widely honoured, presiding at international congresses, and elected as a foreign member of the Royal Society. He died suddenly on 14 March 1889, but his work lives on.

Allvar Gullstrand and the slit lamp 1911.

The Swedish ophthalmologist and self-taught mathematician Allvar Gullstrand (1862-1930) invented the slit lamp to illuminate the anterior of the eye. With its rectangular beam of very bright light, he studied the structure of the cornea and the function of the lens. His dioptric investigations showed that, as well as the extracapsular mechanism described by Helmholtz, changes in the substance of the lens, that he termed intracapsular, also contribute to accommodation. However, his invention has been appropriated by clinical ophthalmologists and is now routinely used in examination of the eye.

Douglas Argyll Robertson (1837-1909) and his pupil.

Douglas Argyll Robertson's (1837-1909) experimental work with physostigmine in 1863 sharpened his knowledge of the innervation of the internal muscles of the eye. So he was ideally prepared in 1869 to analyse the conundrum when he saw patients with spinal cord disease who had lost the response to light even though accommodation to near objects was normal. By translating his knowledge of basic science to a clinical problem he drew attention to this phenomenon, known subsequently as the Argyll Robertson pupil that came to be considered pathognomonic of tabes dorsalis, general paresis and neurovascular syphilis.