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Ophthalmologist and founder of the charity Second Sight
Biography-Lucy Mathen was a journalist for 15 years and became a television reporter for programmes including John Craven's Newsround . She retrained as a doctor at the age of 36 at St George's Hospital Medical School in Tooting, south London. She became an ophthalmologist and in 2000 founded the charity Second Sight ( www.secondsight.org.uk ). The charity sends individual surgeons on a rota basis to hospitals in remote, rural areas of north India and funds free cataract surgery for the blind. Second Sight now works exclusively in Bihar and Orissa states, where the cataract blindness problem is the worst in the world. She has written a book, A Runaway Goat: Curing Blindness in Forgotten India , about her experiences. Each book sold funds a cataract operation for a blind patient in Bihar or Orissa (see the Second Sight website).
Why did you choose to train in ophthalmology?
I chose it because the ophthalmologists seemed to be the happiest doctors at St George's, and because after my first sight of the optic disc seen in full magnified splendour with an ophthalmoscope, I was hooked.
Why did you start Second Sight?