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| L.D. Pickwell shown here wearing the badge of President of the Yorkshire Optical Society was also President of the British Optical Association 1972-3 and of the International Optometric and Optical League 1980-86. |
In 1957 the Higher Education role of the Bradford Technical College was handed to the Bradford Institute of Technology. In 1966 the Institute became the University of Bradford with the Prime Minister himself, Harold Wilson, as Chancellor. Ophthalmic Optics became a School of Studies in its own right as opposed to being part of the Physics Department, with David Pickwell still as Senior Lecturer. Pickwell's leading national role in the upgrading of the education of optometrists following the Opticians Act of 1958 placed him in a favourable position to ensure that optometry at Bradford became a full degree course. It became a clinically-based honours degree, most of whose graduates went into clinical practice, but it also offered postgraduate degrees on a part-time basis for practising optometrists or full-time basis for overseas students. The Senior Lecturer was himself awarded an MSc in 1973. In these early years the department's main research interests were in the psychophysical assessment of changes in the eye and vision and in the topic of binocular vision. A specialist Binocular Vision Clinic had been established as early as 1956 and by the 1970s staff from other universities would attend this clinic over a number of months to obtain experience in that field.
The School acquired its first professor in 1978. Traditional attitudes and some external pressure combined to force the appointment of a physicist rather than an optometrist to this role, however after some vigorous debate the University retained Pickwell as Head of Department and gave the new professor the title Professor of Visual Science.
A set of Bradford Stereoscope cards was also published in 1978.
In 1984 David Pickwell was finally appointed to his own separate Chair in Optometry which he held until retirement in 1992. In his inaugural lecture, Two Eyes are Better Than One, delivered in the Richmond Building on 21st October 1985, Professor Pickwell highlighted the department's work on binocular co-ordination:
The eyes may move out of their precise alignment so that no image is exactly in register in either eye. The amount of misalignment may be very small and the person may experience no double vision because the displacment of the images is too small to be appreciated consciously. However it can be detected clinically. In the Optometry School at Bradford, we have been able to show that there is a correlation between these small disparities in fixing an object with the two eyes and the onset of symptoms.This can be used as a method of detecting binocular vision stress.
The resulting research led to a trend within the Bradford clinics to refer more cases for surgery at an early stage whereas previously the tendency might have been to automatically prescribe eye exercises in the first instance, in the hope that they would work.
Much of the research in the School of Optometry here has been concerned with a better understanding of how optometry can better help the patients who consult optometrists.
By 2006 Bradford's annual intake was 100 UK students and 10 from overseas. There were 720 applications for these places and the university reported that a noticeable trend was the lack of physics among many of the applicants which 'added to a general lack of confidence in students' numeracy'.
Optometry at Bradford is now part of the School of Life Sciences. Find out about studying optometry at Bradford today.