Charles Schepens

Charles Louis Schepens (March 13, 1912 - March 28, 2006) was an influential Belgian (later American) ophthalmologist, regarded by many in the profession as "the father of modern retinal surgery", and member of the French Resistance.

Schepens was born in Mouscron, Belgium in 1912; his father was a physician. He initially studied mathematics before graduating from medical school in 1935 at State University of Ghent in Belgium. Schepens then trained in ophthalmology at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London, England prior to World War II. After the Germans invaded Belgium in 1940, he became a medical officer in the Belgian Air Force

After the fall of Belgium, Schepens escaped to France where he became active in the French Resistance smuggling documents and people over the Pyrenees to Spain during 1942 and 1943. Schepens was twice captured by the Gestapo. He worked under the alias of Jacques Perot, a lumber mill operator in the French Basque village of Mendive. Aware that the Germans had learned of the operation, he escaped to England.

After the war, Schepens resumed his medical career at Moorfields. In 1947, he immigrated to the United States and became a fellow at the Harvard Medical School. Schepens is credited for creating the vitreo-retinal subspecialty in ophthalmology. In 1949, he established the world's first retina service and first retinal disease fellowship at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary. He founded a research laboratory for the investigation of retinal disease, the Retina Foundation, in 1950. Now known as the Schepens Eye Research Institute [1], it is affiliated with Harvard and the Massachusetts General Hospital. It has grown from 6 staff initially to 200 as of 2006, and is the largest independent eye research organization in the United States. In 1967, Schepens founded The Retina Society and was its first president from 1968 to 1969.

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