OLIVER FAIRFIELD WADSWORTH. ' 675 



year, Ophthalmic Surgeon to the Massachusetts Charitable Eye and 

 Ear Infirmary. 



In all these positions he displayed the same care, patience, tact, 

 and skill, and his reputation as a practitioner and diagnostician was 

 enhanced by his clarity as a teacher for, scrupulously careful as he was 

 himself in all his observations, he was equally patient in the demon- 

 stration of his ascertained facts and in the training of his students. 

 He was an active member and, for a time, president of the New Eng- 

 land Ophthalmological Society and both there and in his papers 

 before the Boston Society of Medical Sciences displayed in the dis- 

 cussion of mathematical subjects an ability which won him the 

 confidence of his compeers. As a member of the American Ophthal- 

 mological Society he was a valuable contributor in its meetings, 

 quite as much in the way of discussion of other papers as in the care- 

 fully prepared communications which he himself presented for he was 

 strenuous in argument, keen in perception of failure in a logical se- 

 quence, and dogged in his determination to arrive at the scientific 

 facts in any subject under consideration. 



With all the work entailed by his hospital appointments and the 

 demands of a large private practice, Dr. Wadsworth found time for 

 study in his favorite subject, he was a close student of ophthalmologic 

 literature and was almost encyclopedic in his ability to refer to and 

 place a title or an author. 



Of the forty-six original papers contributed by Dr. Wadsworth in 

 the meetings of the various societies of which he was a member and to 

 foreign journals, fifteen were upon conditions in the retina, choroid 

 or optic nerve as might be expected of one who as an ophthalmo- 

 scopist was, as one of his associates has said, "the admiration and 

 despair of his colleagues," nine papers treated of operations, four 

 were upon anomalies of muscular balance and four were based upon 

 original scientific research, including his description of the fovea 

 centralis. 



In addition to his special interests he found time to devote himself 

 to the more general service of the members of his profession as assis- 

 tant editor of the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal during the 

 year 1868, and as one of the most valuable contributors of time, 

 thought and labor to the upbuilding of the Boston Medical Library, 

 a project originating with the late Dr. J. R Chadwick and now grown 

 to be of great value not only in itself to this community, but as an 

 example which has been followed in the foundation of similar libraries 

 throughout the United States. 



