John Cunningham Saunders (Fig. ), was born in Devonshire in 1773 and at the age of seventeen was apprenticed to a surgeon named John Hill in the town of Barnstaple, Devon. He served his apprenticeship for five years before moving to London where he studied at St. Thomas' Hospital and Guy's Medical School under Astley Cooper. He was subsequently appointed demonstrator of anatomy at St. Thomas' Hospital, succeeding Astley Cooper in that post. Because he had not been an apprentice at the Royal College of Surgeons, he was not eligible for an appointment to a London teaching hospital. However, he set up in practice and was the first regularly trained surgeon in Britain to devote himself exclusively to diseases of the eye and ear. In October 1804 he published a proposal to found a charitable institution for the cure of diseases of the eye and the ear. He was inspired to do so by a perception of an increase in eye disease in the country, a major contributory element in this being the number of cases of so-called Egyptian ophthalmia. This was a purulent conjunctivitis largely due to trachoma which had been contracted by troops serving in the Napoleonic campaign in Egypt. The charity was instituted and in March 1805 The London Dispensary for Curing Diseases of the Eye and Ear opened in Charterhouse Square (Fig. ) with Saunders as its first surgeon. He soon recognised that his skill could be best served by limiting his practice to diseases of the eye and in 1808 he convinced the governors of the hospital of the wisdom of this action and they agreed to change the name of the hospital to The London Infirmary for Curing Diseases of the Eye. This institution subsequently became Moorfields Eye Hospital.
In a report to the committee of the charity in 1808 he wrote, There is one point on which I must beg the indulgence of expatiating; I mean the adaptation of an operation on a cataract to the condition of childhood, by which I have successfully cured without a failure 14 persons born blind, some of them even in infancy, and it has just been performed on an infant only two months old, who is in a state of convalescence. As I reserve for another occasion the communication of the method which I pursue for the cure of very young children, I shall no further compare it