Person

Travers, Thomas A'Beckett (Tom) (1902 - 1999)

Born
16 August 1902
Victoria, Australia
Died
1999
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Occupation
Ophthalmologist

Summary

Tom Travers was a pioneer of corneal transplants in Australia and was the first to do them in large numbers, from 1948. After gaining his specialist qualifications in the United Kingdom, he became consultant to the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, concurrently undertaking research in strabismus. From this study he practised not only occlusion but also early surgery for strabismus. In the 1940s he adopted the technique of intracapscular cataract extraction with sutured closure, made safer by his use of relaxant general anaesthesia. This allowed a rapid recovery time and became the standard procedure in Australia for generation. Submissions made by Travers to the Victorian Government contributed to the passing of the Corneal Grafting Act 1956 which regularised the donation of eyes.

Skip to

Details

Chronology

1925
Education - MB BS, University of Melbourne
1930
Education - Diploma of Ophthalmic Medicine and Surgery, Moorfields Eye Hospital, London, United Kingdom
1935
Award - Curzon Prize, British Medical Association
1941
Education - Doctor of Science (DSc), University of Melbourne
1946 - 1962
Career position - Honorary Ophthalmologist, Royal Melbourne Hospital
1960 - 1961
Career position - President, Ophthalmological Society of Australia
1962 - 1972
Career position - Consulting Ophthalmologist, Royal Melbourne Hospital
1972
Award - Knight bachelor (Kt)

Related Corporate Bodies

Published resources

Journal Articles

  • Coster, Douglas J., 'History of corneal transplantation in Australia', Clinical and Experimental Ophthalmology, 43 (2015), 268-76. Details
  • Crawford, B. A., 'Obituary: Thomas a'Beckett Travers', Australian Journal of Ophthalmology, 27 (1999), 448-9. Details

Resources

Helen Cohn

Last modified: 5 December 2016

EOAS ID: biogs/P005708b.htm

Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
What do we mean by this?

Published by Swinburne University of Technology.
This Edition: 2024 November (Ballambar - Gariwerd calendar - early summer - season of butterflies)
Reference: http://www.bom.gov.au/iwk/calendars/gariwerd.shtml#ballambar
For earlier editions see the Internet Archive at: https://web.archive.org/web/*/www.eoas.info

The Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation uses the Online Heritage Resource Manager (OHRM), a relational data curation and web publication system developed by the eScholarship Research Centre and its predecessors at the University of Melbourne 1999-2020. The OHRM has been maintained by Gavan McCarthy since 2020.

Cite this page: https://www.eoas.info/biogs/P005708b.htm

"... the rengitj, as a visible mark or imprint on the land, is characterised as a place of origin, the repository of all names, as well as a kind of mapped visual expression of the connection between people and places which is to be carried out in the temporal sequence of the journey." Fanca Tamisari (1998) 'Body, Vision and Movement: In the footprints of the ancestors'. Oceania 68(4) p260