Dame Ida

Posted by Barbara on February 3, 2025 in Blog, Dame, feminism, Medical, women scientists, Women's equality issues | 2 comments

Do you wear contact lenses? Ever wondered when and how they were developed? Dames, I bring you Ida Mann.

Dame Ida Mann was a pioneer in the field of ophthalmology. She was the first woman to hold the title of professor at Oxford University and was instrumental in the advancement and development of contact lenses.

Mann was born in West Hampstead on February 6, 1893. She was heading for a career in the Post Office until a charitable donation led to an invitation to visit Whitechapel Hospital. She returned home ‘in an ecstatic daze’, intent on a medical career.  Despite opposition from her father, she applied to study medicine at the London School of Medicine for Women, the only medical school open to women at that time. She passed the matriculation examination in 1914, one of only eight women out of hundreds of passes. She completed her studies, ‘with no trouble and intense delight’, and qualified as Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery in 1920.

She was appointed as the Ophthalmic House Surgeon at St. Mary’s Hospital in London and wrote her thesis on the embryology of the human eye, for which she was awarded her D.Sc. in 1924. By 1927, after a spell at the London Eye Hospital, she was made senior surgeon at the Moorfields Eye Hospital. This was the first time a woman had been given the post. Mann went on to introduce several pioneering techniques that improved the eye health of many and published seminal texts on ophthalmology, including The Development of the Human Eye (1928), which remained in print for 40 years.

In 1937 Mann helped the Hungarian contact lens pioneer Josef Dallos escape the imminent Nazi threat in Budapest, apparently having persuaded him of the need for exile during a long taxi ride around the city. Under her direction, patients at Moorfields were fitted with lenses as part of the early trials of Dallos’s work.

In 1940 she undertook some personal research on the treatment of mustard gas burns of the eye.  As a result, she was put in charge of one of the research teams of the Chemical Defence Research Department under the Ministry of Supply. Working with her friend, Davidine Pullinger, and the biochemist, Antoinette Pirie, she analysed the entire pathology of mustard gas keratitis, which afflicted soldiers from the First World War some ten to fifteen years after they had survived a mustard gas attack. Although the team did not find a cure, they were able to alleviate symptoms through the use of contact lenses.

Mann was appointed to a fellowship at St Hugh’s College and in 1945 was made Professor of Ophthalmology, so becoming the first woman to hold a professorship at Oxford in any discipline. During her time at Oxford she overhauled the running of the eye hospital there, treated many injured soldiers, and was the first to use penicillin to treat eye infections.  

Mann married Professor William Gye in 1944 and in 1949 they emigrated to Australia, where Mann would stay for the rest of her life. Her ground-breaking studies of eye problems among First Nation people for the World Health Organisation led in 1966 to the publication of Culture, Race, Climate and Eye Disease.  

 At the same time, she wrote travel books under the name Caroline Gye, including The Cockney and the Crocodile (1962). She died at her desk in Perth in 1983.  Ain’t that a dame!