Richard Collin B61

 

After leaving Charterhouse in July 1961, the late Mark Godson (Verites, ex-Captain of Cricket) and I went to stay in a French Chateau in Saint Emillion as paying guests to learn some French and something about wine. I then went up to Cambridge while Mark started city life as a jobber with Durlachers.

At Cambridge I read Medicine and was master and hunted the Trinity Foot university beagles. I then went to Westminster Hospital to complete my clinical training as a doctor. Once qualified I joined P&O as a ship’s doctor for a year and did two line voyages to Australia with cruises up to Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore and the South Pacific. After that I returned to the UK to complete my studies at Moorfields Eye Hospital to become an eye surgeon which included a six-week trip as a flying eye surgeon in East Africa with “Sight by Wings”.

My main ophthalmological interest was eyelid surgery but to do that effectively I had to get training in plastic surgery. 

 I worked at the Queen Victoria plastic surgery unit in East Grinstead and then with Jack Mustarde in Glasgow before going to San Francisco for eighteen months to learn, specifically, about ophthalmic plastic as opposed to general plastic surgery. On my return I joined the professorial unit at Moorfields Eye Hospital, first as a lecturer and then senior lecturer and then became a consultant at Moorfields Eye Hospital. This gave me a wonderful career operating, teaching, writing and lecturing on a global basis for which I was made a professor by UCL.

When I was seventy-five years old, Moorfields decided that I had to leave the NHS. I am now in the process of retiring from my private practice which will allow me to spend more time on my hobbies, which include sailing, fishing, shooting, walking, reading history and non-medical books, as well as going to the theatre and enjoying the arts and opera.