Sir Nicholas Harold Lloyd Ridley (10 July 1906 – 25 May 2001) was an English ophthalmologist who invented the intraocular lens and pioneered intraocular lens surgery for cataract patients.
Early years
Nicholas Harold Lloyd Ridley was born in Kibworth Harcourt, Leicestershire, the elder son of Nicholas Charles Ridley and his wife, Margaret (née Parker). He had a younger brother. Known from childhood by his middle name (Harold), Ridley had a stammer which he was largely able to manage. As a child he met and sat on the lap of Florence Nightingale, a close friend of his mother.
He was educated at Charterhouse School before studying at Pembroke College, Cambridge from 1924 to 1927, and completed his medical training in 1930 at St Thomas' Hospital. Subsequently, he worked as a surgeon at both St Thomas' and Moorfields Eye Hospital in London, specialising in ophthalmology. In 1938, Ridley was appointed full surgeon and consultant at Moorfields Hospital and later appointed consultant surgeon in 1946.
Cataract operations and intraocular lenses
During World War II, Ridley saw Royal Air Force casualties with eye injuries, including Squadron Leader Gordon "Mouse" Cleaver of 601 Squadron. Ridley observed that when splinters of acrylic plastic from aircraft cockpit canopies became lodged in their eyes, this did not trigger inflammatory rejection as did glass splinters. This led him to propose the use of artificial lenses to treat cataract. He had a lens manufactured using the same material – brand name Perspex, made by ICI – and on 29 November 1949 at St Thomas' Hospital, Ridley achieved the first implant of an intraocular lens, although it was not until 8 February 1950 that he left an artificial lens permanently in place in an eye. The first lens was manufactured by Rayner. The first IOL implant in the United States was performed in 1952: a Rayner-Ridley lens implanted at the Wills Eye Hospital in Philadelphia. The intraocular lens was approved as "safe and effective" and approved for use in the USA by the Food and Drug Administration in 1981. The first FDA-approved lenses – Choyce Mark VIII and Choyce Mark IX Anterior Chamber – were manufactured by Rayner.
In 1987, Gordon "Mouse" Cleaver, whose injury in 1940 helped Ridley conceive the idea of using an acrylic intraocular lens, underwent cataract surgery and the implantation of such a lens to restore his sight.
Wartime service and ophthalmic research
Ridley was in civilian hospital services in South East England during the early years of World War II, when he saw injured pilots from the Battle of Britain. In the middle - to end-years of the war he was with the R.A.M.C (Royal Army Medical Corps) and was posted to West Africa and South East Asia.
Onchocerciasis (River Blindness) While in Africa, Ridley led important research into onchocerciasis when he was stationed in the Gold Coast, now Ghana, for part of his war service. In 1941, while he acted as part-time sanitation officer at the capital city of Accra, he met Brigadier G. M. Findlay, AMS, who stimulated Ridley's interest to study River Blindness, an endemic disease in parts of the country. To find onchocerciasis patients, Ridley left the coastal city and travelled overland with Captain John Holden to north west Ghana. He worked in Funsi in the Wa East District of the Upper West Region for two weeks, examining patients with a slit-lamp which ran off a 12-volt battery. Most (90%) had onchocerciasis; ten percent of them were blind. Conditions were primitive and Ridley recorded his observations of the retinal fundus by water-colour painting and photography. His painting of the fundus (sometimes termed the "Ridley fundus" of onchocerciasis) was completed in Accra upon his return from Funsi. "The attention he called to this disease constitutes one of Mr. Ridley's major contributions. His monograph 'Ocular Onchocerciasis', published in 1945 in a supplement of the British Journal of Ophthalmology, was a landmark."