Introduction
If you are reading this, you consider yourself lucky to do this experiment.
Imagine closing your eyes and someone reading you these lines. How relaxing as you just enjoy listening without bothering to read or keeping your eyes open. You don’t mind doing this and enjoy it as you always knew that whenever you feel like you can open your eyes to read and enjoy the beauty of the world to see.
What if you can never open your eyes afterwards to see anything? You would never want to close your eyes for anything.
Feels scary? Hurt?
Imagine the fate of people waiting out there for someone who can bring back their vision by opening their eyes to see and enjoy the freedom of vision all over again.
Though restoring vision by donating your eyes is limited to treating corneal blindness alone, it has a greater impact when it comes to brightening an individual’s world of vision.
By donating your eyes you brighten the hopes of millions of people.
The History of Eye Donation
How it all Started
The Eye-Bank for Sight Restoration, the world’s first eye bank, is devoted to restoring sight through eye donations and cornea transplants
Some miracles just happen:
This pioneering agency which changed the lives of thousands and led the way for the whole field of transplantation, resulted from the brilliant partnership of an ophthalmologist Dr R. Townley Paton, M.D with a dream and a dynamic woman Mrs. Aida Breckinridge, a genius for motivating people.
The dream was to create a system that would allow people to pledge their eyes at death so that others, suffering from corneal blindness, could regain their sight.
As early as 1905, doctors had discovered that corneal blindness could be cured by replacing the damaged cornea with another clear human cornea.
A young ophthalmologist, R. Townley Paton, M.D., was convinced that cornea transplantation was a viable cure that could provide thousands of patients with visual redemption.
The Idea of an Eye Bank:
Dr. Paton had trained with the famous Dr. William Holland Wilmer at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. He later established his own practice in New York City and became affiliated with Manhattan Eye, Ear & Throat Hospital.
There he began to perform cornea transplants with tissue he obtained privately. One source of tissue was prisoners on death row.
At the time, the death penalty was in practice, so Dr. Paton would make periodic visits to nearby Sing-Sing prison. With permission from proper authorities, he would obtain consent for donation from prisoners on death row and bring the donor tissue back to the hospital after a prisoner had been executed.
It may have been on one of these late night forays that Dr. Paton came to the brilliant conclusion that what was needed was a system for collecting eye donations, processing them and distributing them to doctors for transplant surgeries.
People could pledge their eyes in advance of their death, leaving a legacy of sight, just as they already made out their wills. He envisioned an eye bank.
The Organization is founded
Dr. Paton and a small group of doctors and laymen from surrounding institutions formed an organization on December 15, 1944 in a small room at Manhattan Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital and laid the groundwork for The Eye-Bank for Sight Restoration.
They designed a plan in which eyes could be systematically obtained, preserved and redistributed to doctors who were performing cornea transplant operations.
Thanks to an Inspirational Woman
To help implement the plan, Dr. Paton wisely solicited the help of Mrs. Aida Breckinridge, a known powerhouse for motivating people.
Mrs. Breckinridge had worked tirelessly to establish The Wilmer Institute which opened in 1929. And after that she led other causes including President Hoover’s Child Health Association.
Well-connected to society, business leaders and political figures of the time, Mrs. Breckinridge could wield the influence needed to popularize a unique idea. Plus, the thought of an agency to restore sight appealed to her because she herself suffered from glaucoma and was nearly blind.
Early Challenges
The eye bank was underway. But progress was not without its hurdles — some predictable, others unforeseen.
State regulators were put off from incorporating a bank that did not do financial transactions. With legal counsel, the problem was solved by inserting a hyphen into the phrase eye bank and adding further description, hence, The Eye-Bank for Sight Restoration, Inc., as it is called today.
There was no legal precedent for obtaining anatomical gifts. So laws had to be amended allowing any person to direct the manner in which his body should be disposed of after death.
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