Charles L Schepens (courtesy of the Schepens family).
Charles L Schepens, the world renowned retinal surgeon and founder of the Schepens Eye Research Institute in Boston, USA, died on 28 March 2006 after suffering a stroke. Born in Belgium in 1912, Schepens's boyhood academic interests were in mathematics. However, he decided to study medicine and received his medical degree in 1935. In 1936 and 1937, his postgraduate training was obtained at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London, where his leanings toward quantitative science helped shape his early interest in instrumentation. In 1937 he returned to Brussels where he worked at the Clinique St Jean and Elizabeth until going into active service with the Medical Corps of the Belgian Air Force in 1939.
It is well known that Schepens was an outstanding physician, scientist, and academic leader. However, a second remarkable contribution to humankind has only become very well known over the past few years. Just one week before his death, Schepens received perhaps his highest honour, being named a Knight of the French Legion of Honour. The award was conferred not only for his remarkable contributions to ophthalmic medicine, but also for his role as a Nazi resistance leader.
Dr Schepens practised ophthalmology in Brussels until 1942 when he barely escaped arrest by the Gestapo for aiding the Belgian resistance. In France, he adopted the name of Jacques Perot and moved to a village in the Basque country where he continued his work for the resistance. There, he acted as a lumber‐mill manager, using the company's logging activities in the mountains as a camouflage to help more than 100 people escape to Spain. He rebuilt the lumber‐mill from practically nothing, and hired several hundred workers whom he imported from abroad. This was a heroic and risky sacrifice, putting his family in immediate danger of the Gestapo on multiple occasions. Indeed, the family just narrowly escaped arrest when the Nazis learned of the lumber‐mill in 1943.
Although some publications describing the resistance movement mentioned Dr Schepens as a participant, his role started to emerge into more widespread recognition when in the mid‐1980s Meg Ostrum (an American museum curator) contacted him in Boston inquiring whether he might be Jacques Perot. She had a letter to deliver to Perot from a Basque priest she had met in France who remembered what Dr Schepens had done during the war. The priest knew only that Perot was now an eye doctor in Boston. Although Schepens was reluctant to admit his former life as Perot, Ostrum's persistence ultimately led to their meeting and the delivery of the letter. For the next 15 years, Ostrum carefully researched Perot's heroic acts, and published a book about Perot/Schepens in 2004.
Schepens's contributions to ophthalmology are also remarkable. Returning to Moorfields late in the war, Schepens both worked with Ambrose King in general ophthalmology and also set out to design a head mounted, binocular, indirect ophthalmoscope. The prototype of his design was crafted from scrap metal, glass, and other bits of hardware that he scavenged from the streets of east London following the German blitz. One version of his design is held by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, and another at the clinical practice, Retina Associates, which he founded in Boston.
Following the establishment of the first retina service at Moorfields, Schepens then moved to the Massachusetts Eye and Ear infirmary and the Howe Laboratory at Harvard Medical School in 1947. He worked first as a fellow in the Howe Laboratory. In 1949, he established the first retina service in the United States at MEEI, which he directed for several years.
In 1950 Schepens founded a new research laboratory called the Retina Foundation. The first home of the laboratory was in a nearby tenement building, funded by personal funds and modest charitable donations. Indeed, the new laboratory was on the brink of closing when it received a key donation from the Rockefeller Foundation. In the ensuing 55 years, the laboratory would change buildings twice and evolve into the largest independent eye research institute in the United States. Beginning with six researchers directly collaborating with Schepens, the institute would evolve into a centre with two dozen laboratories and 200 staff. More importantly, the centre would serve as a leading force in developing innovative surgical techniques and ophthalmic instrumentation. Six hundred postdoctoral fellows would train at the institute and 400 eye surgeons would receive their training at the Schepens Retina Associates. The Retina Foundation is now known as the Schepens Eye Research Institute and the clinical practice and clinical research facility as the Schepens Retina Associates Foundation.
Charles Schepens thus made an enormous contribution to ophthalmology and vision science in his own work and in the founding of Schepens Retina Associates and the Retina Foundation. But there was much more to the man than is widely known. His work during the resistance is awe inspiring and his reluctance to let others know of his heroic activities is indicative of his humanity and humility. His warmth in person is also something that all of us who knew him will miss. I shall never forget the times that Charles and I had afternoon tea in his office, his encouraging words, and his genuine interest in my family and my work. Indeed, I can still hear him say “Ono—what's exciting in the lab today?”
We have lost a giant with Charles's passing. But what a legacy he leaves.