THE AMERICAN OPHTHALMOLOGICAL SOCIETY

Abstract

The American Ophthalmological Society is now completing seventy-five years of activity. The officers decided to commemorate this occasion and invited me to review this long and honorable history of scientific and professional association in the service and devotion to ophthalmology. Scientific societies, it must be remembered, are distinctly modern institutions. They came into being with the Renaissance in the seventeenth century in Rome and Florence. Similar societies soon appeared in London and in Oxford; those in Oxford combined and formed the Royal Society of London, which received its charter in 1662 ; the French Academy of Sciences came into being in 1666. The oldest Medical Society of London was founded in 1773, the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society in 1805 and the British Medical Association in 1832. The American Medical Association was called into being in 1847. These facts have been told in order to bring out the relatively early period