Moorfields Eye Hospital

Moorfields Eye Hospital began in eighteen hundred and five as a direct response to a health crisis triggered by the Napoleonic Wars. Thousands of soldiers returned from the Egyptian campaign suffering from a blinding infectious condition known as military ophthalmia. The infection spread rapidly among the civilian population as veterans returned to their homes. To address this public emergency, a young surgeon named John Cunningham Saunders founded the London Dispensary for Curing Diseases of the Eye and Ear in a modest building on Charterhouse Square.