The College of Optometrists

Our feature this month is not an object but an organisation. The World Council of Optometry meets in London this month. Its association with the city has been closer than younger delegates may realise.

 

Delegates from Germany and the Netherlands in Oxford, 1935

IOOL Logo 1969-1985

Paper weight from the St Louis Meeting 1978

IOOL Logo 1985-1995

WOD Poster 1986

The first suggestion for an International Optical League came in 1924 as the result of a French court case. Monsieur Odin had fallen foul of national laws in practising retinoscopy! The support of British ophthalmic opticians proved insufficient to prevent him losing his case. A proposal for the formation of an international body was brought to an international conference in Leipzig the following year but agreement could not be reached. At the important optical congress of 1927, sponsored by the British Optical Association and held in Oxford, 'a firm and unanimous resolution was passed placing the idea on a substantial foundation with promises of support from all quarters'. The first member countries of the International Optical League (IOL) were France, Germany, Great Britain, Holland, Switzerland and the USA. Membership would remain primarily European until after the Second World War. The first President was Mr J.H. Sutcliffe, host of the Oxford conference and the first Secretary was to be Herr Lohmann of Germany. Shortly afterwards, however, he resigned and the secretariat passed from Berlin to London where it would remain until 1996.

 

In the early days the League's role was one of boosting the image of optics generally. 'Optometric' was not added to its title until 1969. The IOL intervened in various court cases. These included:

• Paul Bas, Optician of Amsterdam, who won his case against the Dutch medical establishment for having used an ophthalmometer for refraction.
• J.L. Saks, Optician of Pretoria, who won his appeal against a conviction for 'testing for reward the eyesight of two persons'.
• Kerff, Belgian Optician, who won an important test case against the Belgian medical establishment for 'illegally practising the art of healing' through the use of refractive instruments. Interestingly the IOL's support was led by a British ophthalmologist rather than an optician.
• Albert Schwartz, FBOA, British optician of Cairo, the case against whom collapsed when the IOL argued that prescribing a presbyopic correction could hardly be construed as the illegal practice of medicine.

The League's main role, however, was as an informal forum to share knowledge on optics and optical professional practice across national boundaries. It helped that delegates generally paid their own way to meetings and that the membership base was small. Meetings were held in conjunction with major optical congresses in Berlin, Stuttgart, Paris, Amsterdam, Cambridge, Delft, Jena, Stockholm and Florence. Although the League's work was discontinued during the Second World War it was revived in 1947 when George Giles convened a meeting of the surviving former committee members in London. The first post-war meeting was held in Bern in 1950 but this was not a major congress, the first of which was the London International Optical Congress of 1951. Another London congress was held in 1970 and the last, before this month, in 1984.

 

Although the League Secretary was generally the Secretary of the British Optical Association they were helped by assistant secretaries of whom the first was Ivy Parnum, later Mrs Giles. She ran the Secretariat from the BOA headquarters in Brook Street. Later administrators were Margaret Darby and the American-born Dorothy Leason (1979-1996) who oversaw the office move to the 3rd floor of the British College of Ophthalmic Opticians at Knaresbrough Place in Earls Court. A change of title to include 'optometric' was first mooted by Israeli and South African delegates in 1955, but there was to be a gap of fourteen more years before the term enjoyed sufficient worldwide acceptance.

 

Following its renaming as the International Optometric and Optical League (IOOL) in 1969 and the revision of its constitution in 1975 the work of the League expanded in various directions. A committee on Legal and Legislative Developments was established in 1975. Significant court cases included:

• 1977: Six Italian opticians were cleared of wrongdoing for including the word 'optometrist' in their business signs
• 1978: Michel Bartholome, Belgian optician, won the case brought against him by the ophthalmologists, for having fitted contact lenses and used a keratometer
• 1979: The Greek government (at that point not yet a member of the Common Market) passed a law that 'the practice of optometry as a profession is forbidden'!
• 1980: Following a court case in Badajoz the Spanish government recognised the absolute right of suitably qualified opticians to practise optometry

A newsletter 'Interoptics' was published in both English and Japanese. The College currently holds issues 17-68 (1977-1985) and is keen to solicit the donation of earlier or later issues.

 

By its fiftieth anniversary meeting in Dusseldorf, in 1977, the League could claim to be 'a truly international voice....an authority on education, training (and) scope of practice'. Three of the original delegates from 1927 were able to attend this meeting including Sutcliffe's great friend W.J. de Bruyne, incidentally a great supporter and donor to the BOA Museum. The next year the League held a General Delegates Meeting in St Louis, USA, its first such meeting in the 'New World', and in 1980 it went to Japan. That year an Australian proposal to rename the League simply the International Optometric League was defeated.

 

The recognition of a changing international scene with an ever more diverse set of national legal systems to negotiate, plus the sometimes perilous financial situation caused some to see the League's future in a new role as a general strategic body. The League now had member organisations in 27 different countries, not all English-speaking, and the interests of some were very different from the majority. For instance in the 1980s there was renewed pressure from some Asian countries to consider the approval of part-trained or 'barefoot' optometrists able to offer only a restricted form of practice. In 1982 the President also made the shocking announcement that still 'Two-thirds of the countries of the world know nothing of optometry'. The League instigated a World Optometry Day each March and experimented with the appointment of a full-time Executive Director, Don Schaefer of Canada, in 1984 but the funding to continue this post proved insufficient after 1986 though that same year the American Dr G. Burtt Holmes became the League's first non-UK President. Peter Smith, by now retired from the College, remained as 'Honorary' Secretary to the IOOL. A formal proposal to change the role of the League was first proposed by Peter Roost at the meeting in Luxembourg in 1989.

 

Two World Conferences on Optometric Education were held in 1990 (USA) and 1993 (Hong Kong) and a regional conference on the same subject was held in Africa in 1992.

 

Presidents of IOOL
John H. Sutcliffe (UK)	1927-1940
Sir William Champness (UK)	1947-1953
George Giles (UK)	1953-1965
George A. Wheatcroft (UK)	1971-1980
Dr David Pickwell (UK)	1980-1986
G. Burtt Holmes (USA)	1986-1992
Peter Roost (Switzerland)	1992-1994

A 'Think Tank' held in Paris in November 1992 led ultimately to the appointment of a five man 'Task Force' which sat between August and December 1993. The UK representative was Ian Hunter FCOptom. It held meetings in London and Washington and concluded that the IOOL should dissolve and form a new strategic planning body, a 'World Council of Optometry', with legal status in Geneva but a Secretariat (eventually) in North America. A recommendation of the Task Force that already arouses a smile from the historian is that electronic databases could be maintained in the United States accessible via the latest technology - dial-up Internet.

 

The WCO was formally established in 1995. Its administration continued to be run from London until 31 December 1996.

 

The World Council of Optometry now has member organisations from 40 separate countries and is administered from offices at the Pennslvania College of Optometry though an open invitation has been issued recently to potential new hosts. The College of Optometrists is honoured that the current President is one of its own, Robert Chappell FCOptom. 

 

The WCO's Second World Conference on Optometric Globalisation, organised in conjunction with the College of Optometrists, is to be held in London on 11-13 April 2008.