He Lost His Sight and Found a Vision

When twelve-year-old John Wilson walked into his chemistry class at Scarborough High School for Boys on a rainy day in late October 1931, he had no way of knowing that his life was about to change completely. The class experiment that day was to show how heating a container of water would bring oxygen bubbling to the surface, something students at his school and at schools all around the world had been doing for a very long time. The container the teacher gave John to heat, however, was not like the containers students everywhere had used. Somehow, this container mistakenly held something more volatile than water. It turned out that the container had the wrong solution because a laboratory assistant had been distracted and put the wrong label on the bottle. And when John heated it with a Bunsen burner, the container exploded, shattering glass bottles in the vicinity, destroying a portion of the classroom, and pelting the students with razor-edged shards. Several students came away from this accident bleeding.

John Wilson came away from it blinded in both eyes.

Wilson spent the next two months in the hospital. When he returned home, his parents attempted to find a way to deal with the catastrophe that had befallen their lives. But Wilson did not regard the accident as catastrophic. “It did not strike me even then as a tragedy,” he said once in an interview with the Times of London. He knew he had the rest of his life to live, and he did not intend to live it in an understated way. He learned Braille quickly and continued his education at the esteemed Worcester College for the Blind. There, he not only excelled as a student but also became an accomplished rower, swimmer, actor, musician, and orator.

From Worcester, Wilson studied law at Oxford. Away from the protected environs of a school set up for blind students, he needed to contend with a busy campus and the very active streets in the vicinity. Rather than relying on a walking stick, though, he relied on an acute sense of hearing and what he called his “obstacle sense” to keep him out of harm’s way. At Oxford, he received his law degree and set out to work for the National Institute for the Blind. His real calling, however, was still waiting for him.

In 1946, Wilson went on a fact-finding tour of British territories in Africa and the Middle East. What he found there was rampant blindness. And unlike the accident that cost him his eyesight, the diseases that affected so many of these people were preventable with the proper medical attention. For Wilson, it was one thing to accept his own fate and quite another to allow something to continue when it could be fixed so easily. This moved him to action.

The report Wilson delivered upon his return led to the formation of the British Empire Society for the Blind, now called Sight Savers International. Wilson himself served as the director of the organization for more than thirty years and accomplished remarkable things during his tenure.

His work often led him to travel more than fifty thousand miles a year, but he considered this an essential part of the job, believing that he needed to be present in the places where his organization’s work was being done. In 1950, he and his wife lived in a mud hut in a part of Ghana known as “the country of the blind” because a disease that came from insect bites had blinded 10 percent of the population. He set his team to work on developing a preventive treatment for the disease, commonly known as “river blindness.” Using the drug Mectizan, the organization inoculated the children in the seven African countries stricken with the disease and all but eradicated it. By the early 1960s, river blindness was overwhelmingly under control. It is no exaggeration to say that generations of African children can thank the efforts of John Wilson for their sight.

Under Wilson’s direction, the organization conducted three million cataract operations and treated twelve million others at risk of becoming blind. They also administered more than one hundred million doses of vitamin A to prevent childhood blindness and distributed Braille study packs to afflicted people throughout Africa and Asia. In all, tens of millions can see because of the commitment John Wilson made to preventing the preventable.

Many people faced with the circumstances Sir John Wilson encountered, would have bemoaned their existence. Perhaps they would have considered themselves cursed by ill fortune and frustrated in their attempts to do anything significant with their lives. Wilson, however, insisted that blindness was “a confounded nuisance, not a crippling affliction,” and he modeled that attitude in the most inspiring possible way.

He lost his sight and found a vision. He proved dramatically that it’s not what happens to us that determines out lives – it’s what we make of what happens.

Source: "The Element" by Sir Ken Robinson (pg. 156-159)