Ida Mann--her wartime career, 1939-1949

Ida Mann's wartime accomplishments were most remarkable. Besides her Harley Street practice and her senior appointment at Moorfields (The Royal London Ophthalmic Hospital), she prevented its closure to ophthalmic patients and chaired the Hospital Management Committee; she investigated the pathology of mustard gas keratitis and formed a Chemical Defence Research Team to study ocular effects of warfare chemicals; she was appointed Margaret Ogilvie Reader in Ophthalmology and senior surgeon to the Oxford Eye Hospital; she established the Nuffield Research Laboratory and was awarded a personal professorship, the first in ophthalmology in Britain, the first professorship given to a woman and the only one in ophthalmology by the University of Oxford. Late in the war she married a cancer research pathologist in whose laboratory she cultured a malignant tumour of the lens. Furthermore, she produced a vast number of outstanding research papers, most notably the authoritative monograph on chemical injury to the anterior segment of the eye.