CHARLES H. WILLIAMS. 5l5 



CHARLES H. WILLIAMS (1850-1918) 



Fellow in Class I, Section 2, 1914 



Charles Herbert Williams was born in Boston April 29, 1850. He 

 was the eldest son of Dr. H. W. W'illiams, Professor of Ophthalmology 

 in the Harvard Medical School, and for many years one of the most 

 distinguished specialists in ocular diseases. The son was graduated 

 from Harvard College in the Class of 1871, and then entered the 

 Harvard Medical School from which he was graduated three ^ears 

 later. With unusual aptitude and inclination toward his father's 

 specialty, he then went abroad and spent the most of the next two 

 years in studying ophthalmology in Zurich, Vienna, and then at 

 Utrecht under Professor Donders, the great pioneer in the investiga- 

 tion and treatment of astigmatism. On returning in 1876 he entered 

 practice with his father at the old home, 15 Arlington St. and spent 

 the next decade in active work at his chosen profession. 



In 1886 he turned his face westward and assumed an administrative 

 position with the C. B. & Q. RaUway, an association which eventually 

 turned his talents into the path along which he was to march far. 

 Presently he became head of the medical and health insurance inter- 

 ests of the great railway system with which he was associated, and his 

 attention was drawn sharply to the grave question of defective vision 

 and especially defective color sense among railway employees. At 

 about that time color blindness as a serious danger was just coming to 

 be fully recognized, and it was to the study of this that Dr. Williams 

 devoted his special attention. About half of the employees of an 

 ordinary railway system have occasion in one way or another to use 

 signals, and since mankind shows three to four per cent of serious cases 

 of color blindness the number of railway employees thus dangerously 

 defective might run to many thousands. With this condition com- 

 plicated by vision otherwise defective the importance of the field of 

 research undertaken by Dr. Williams is vital. 



Up to that time the ordinary means of testing color vision was by 

 the Holmgren worsteds, a scheme most ingeniously devised and in 

 careful hands very effective for diagnosis. Dr. Williams was among 

 the first to recognize the fact that while these worsteds told a truthful 



