Sir John Wilson
Founder of an organization which has given sight to hundreds of thousands of people in poor countries (Reprinted with permission from the Daily Telegraph, December 4, 1999.)
Sir John Wilson, who has died aged 80, founded the Royal Commonwealth Society for the Blind, now known as Sight Savers International, an organization which has given the gift of sight to hundreds of thousands of people in developing countries.
Wilson, who had himself been blinded in a school laboratory accident when he was 12, became involved in the problems of blindness in developing countries in 1946, when he took part in a government-sponsored tour of Africa and the Middle East.
On his return, in a report to the Colonial Office, he proposed the formation of a society to act as a vehicle for raising funds for traveling clinics, schools and training centers for the blind throughout the empire.
As director of the Royal Commonwealth Society for the Blind (originally founded in 1950 as the British Empire Society for the Blind), Wilson traveled 50,000 miles a year in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas, forming organizations for the blind in some 30 commonwealth countries and initiating programs for the prevention of blindness.
In 1950 during a tour of West Africa, he and his wife Jean lived for a time in a mud hut in an area of northern Ghana known as the “Country of the Blind.” There, a disease known as ocular onchocerciasis, caused by the bite of the buffalo gnat which breeds in the river Volta, caused blindness in one out of every 10 people.
Wilson coined the name “river blindness” for the disease and set about establishing the world’s first blindness prevention program; this has been so successful that in the seven countries affected, new cases of the disease are rare.
During the 1960s, after touring the Indian subcontinent, Wilson devised a network of village “eye camps,” where ophthalmic surgeons could undertake cataract operations, treating several thousand people at a time. Today the Society performs around 200,000 cataract operations a year.
At his instigation, the World Health Organization established an International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness to tackle blindness in more than 30 million people around the world. Wilson was appointed president of the agency in 1974, a position he held until his retirement in 1982.
John Foster Wilson was born in Nottingham on January 20, 1919, the son of a Methodist minister.
He went to school in Scarborough and then, following the accident which caused his blindness, at Worcester College for the Blind. From there he won a scholarship to St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, where he read law and social administration and rowed in his college eight.
After graduating in 1941 with a double First, he declined the offer of an academic appointment, instead becoming Assistant Secretary of the Royal National Institute for the Blind, with responsibilities for rehabilitation, employment and international relations.
Wilson’s energies were not confined to the needs of the blind. In November 1981, he initiated an international seminar to consider ways of reducing the number of people suffering from avoidable disabilities of all kinds, estimated at one in 10 of the world’s population.
He retired as president of the Royal Commonwealth Society for the Blind in 1982, and the next year launched Impact, an international initiative, established under the auspices of the UN Development Program, for the prevention of disability throughout the world.
Despite two hip operations, Wilson and his wife Jean continued to travel the world, establishing Impact foundations as far afield as India, Nepal, Bangladesh and the Philippines. In India the Lifeline Express hospital train has treated 150,000 people in seven years. This year Impact launched the Jibon Tari, a floating hospital dispensing medical care among the 33 million Bangladeshis living in the Ganges delta.
Wilson was also instrumental in establishing nutrition programs aimed at reducing disabilities such as goiter and mental handicap caused by dietary deficiencies.
He remained energetic and good-humored throughout his life and refused to regard his own blindness as a tragedy. Earlier this year, in an address to mark the 50th anniversary of the foundation of the Royal Commonwealth Society for the Blind, he quoted a passage from St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans: “All things work together for good to them that love God.” The same passage had formed the text for a sermon delivered by his father three days after the accident in which John Wilson was blinded.
Wilson wrote or edited several books on blindness and disability, among them “Ghana’s Handicapped Citizens” (1961), “Traveling Blind” (1963), and “World Blindness and Its Prevention” (1980). He was much in demand as a speaker at conferences; and he received many honors, including the Helen Keller International Award (1970), the World Humanity Award (1978), the Royal Society of Medicine’s Richard T. Hewitt Award (1991), and the Albert Schweitzer International Prize (1993).
John Wilson was appointed OBE in 1955, CBE in 1965 and was knighted in 1975.
He married, in 1944, Jean McDermid, who in 1967 became deputy director of the Royal Commonwealth Society for the Blind under her husband. She accompanied him on nearly all his journeys. They had two daughters.