The man who learned how to see (but was disappointed with what he saw)

After fifty years of life as a blind person, at the age of fifty-two the Englishman Sidney Bradford attended a routine ophthalmic examination. These visits, which had been going on for several years, simply involved peering under the bandages he wore over his eyes. But this particular appointment turned out differently. Recent advances in surgical techniques meant that a graft could be performed to repair his corneal functioning. A corneal graft replaces the transparent surface of the eye with one from a donor. Such operations were becoming more readily available, and on 9 December 1958 Bradford underwent a corneal graft on his left eye; a month later his right eye was treated. After years of being classified as blind, being independent, and having set up home as a blind person, his sight was suddenly fully restored. The number of historical cases where ophthalmic surgery restores vision fully after complete blindness are exceptionally few and far between. A few weeks after the first graft, a report in the Daily Express about the successful surgery caught the eye of a laboratory assistant, Jean Wallace, and she informed her colleague Richard Gregory, then a lecturer in experimental psychology at Cambridge University. Dropping everything, and knowing Bradford's situation was time-sensitive, they drove to the hospital where he was being treated to begin a series of tests on him. The case study, known in the psychology literature through the anonymised moniker ‘S.B.’, became a cause célèbre. It launched Gregory's career, and boosted the study of the psychology of visual perception and the emerging interdisciplinary area known as ‘vision science’. Descriptions of the surgery and its aftermath soon appeared in numerous psychology textbooks, which were routinely used by undergraduate students.

The resulting case study of S.B., written by Gregory and Wallace and published as a monograph in 1963, is salutary for a number of reasons. First, it is one of the most detailed psychological reports of sight restoration, a rare phenomenon that nonetheless had an illustrious history in medical reports and often engaged the public imagination. One of a series of intermittent reports spread throughout the centuries, there are clear commonalities with the celebrated first report to the Royal Society of a cataract operation on a teenage boy by the surgeon William Cheselden in 1728.