Second Sight: Views from an Eye Doctor's Odyssey

Second Sight: Views from an Eye Doctor’s Odyssey is a lively, textured and engaging memoir written by an ophthalmologist best known worldwide for creating ORBIS, the not-for-profit flying eye hospital staffed by volunteer eye surgeons and designed for hands-on teaching of virtually any selection of modern eye care that is applicable to the needs of the individual host country. An enthusiastic storyteller, the author credits the influences of his formative years as vital to the means he used in forming his unusual life as an academic physician, starting at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. His many stories are often hilarious, sometimes stirring and invariably informative experiences that are based upon a range of people from the poorest to the most powerful, such as the Shah of Iran, Madame Chiang Kai-chek, Adlai Stevenson, King Hussein and Queen Noor of Jordan, the Seaga family of Jamaica, Saudi Arabia’s King Fahad’s #1 wife, and the author’s boss at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, renowned heart doctor Michael E. DeBakey. Paton tells of his opportunistic fallout from dyslexia, his incessant pursuit of thechallenge in bringing western medicine and know-how to developing nations, and his shock at being forced out of ORBIS. Each experience contributes to broaden his perspective that brings an overriding happiness from a life shaped and lived to the limit of his imagination. His career brings many rewards, but he asserts convincingly that none exceeds the thrill of personally restoring sight through surgery, especially when one’s ideas become part of systems that unify the work of others in curing the blindness of millions—-the very core of so-called global ophthalmology.

The author is a graduate of Princeton University and The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine where he later served as a member of the faculty of the Wilmer Eye Institute. He is past Chairman of The American Board of Ophthalmology, past First Vice-President of The American Academy of Ophthalmology, and former Chairman of the Department of Ophthalmology at Baylor College of Medicine.