Frank Buller / [W. Gordon M Byers].

  • Byers, W. Gordon M.
Date:
[1925]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Frank Buller / [W. Gordon M Byers]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    3 A tall, shapely body was crowned by a massive well-formed head. The forehead was broad, the skin clear, the features sharply defined, and the eyes keen and penetrating. His manner was brusque—a relic perhaps of his Western days—and he was sometimes impatient and quick tempered; but these qualities, which occasion¬ ally frightened and offended, but lightly overlay a disposition that was essentially kindly, considerate, and even affectionate. Self-reliant by nature, and fortified by his thorough training, he worked with an assurance that engendered confi¬ dence. The impression that remains is one of strength and decision, yet of innate refinement. Dr. Buller was filled with what, for want of a better term, we must call the medical or nursing instinct; and he was extremely conscientious in the discharge of his duty toward his patients. Surrounded as he was in his early days by nurses and assistants with little or no training in ophthalmology, he gave fully of his own time for dressings and local treatments. It stands to his credit that he spent whole nights in nursing cases that were threatened with loss of vision. In later years when times had changed, a load of detail work was carried that might have been lightened by others with every regard to safety; but his patients felt always his solicitude. He never appeared to such advantage as when dealing with difficult cases, and especially with patients who had been abandoned by others as hopeless. Over the solution of the problems of these people he worked with all the dogged perse¬ verance of his race, and, resourceful, was ever striving to adapt things to their special needs. A striking feature of Dr. Buller’s nature was his marked independ¬ ence and originality of thought. He was impatient of, and did not hesitate to break through, the more rigid conventions and tenets of his day, when he found them embarrassing. As an operator Dr. Buller was effective, with more than the average degree of dexterity. He was equally at home with plastic work and major operations about the orbit, as with muscle work and operations on the globe. His surgical tech¬ nique was advanced for his day. Asepsis and antisepsis were unknown at the Royal London Ophthalmic Hospital during his period of interneship—there was, indeed, a peculiar apathy to Lister’s teaching by his London contemporaries; but Dr. Buller was taught by Bell and by Shepherd at the Montreal General Hospital and his life-long work in operating rooms devoted usually to general surgery kept him abreast in this field. His enthusiasm for his work was unbounded. He liked to discuss difficult clinical problems, and he was always deeply interested in hearing about any inno¬ vation. “No one,” he said in one of his addresses, “can afford to rely upon the knowledge he has gained at college to carry him through life, hence the necessity for new books every year, not many, but a few of the best, and also at least
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