Casey Wood
- Born
- 21 November 1856
- Died
- 26 January 1942 (age 85)
Casey Wood was an ophthalmologist, ornithologist, author, translator, editor and bibliophile. He researched defects of the eye and defective vision and his studies on the eyesight of birds increased our understanding of ophthalmology.
Wood was born in Wellington, Ontario in 1856 and started practice in Montreal as a physician. He had always been interested in ophthalmology and went on to study the subject at postgraduate level in Ottawa, Berlin, Vienna, Paris and London.
He travelled widely, including to Kashmir and to what is now Sri Lanka, and collected a wide range of materials related to his interests, which he later donated to the McGill University Library in Montreal, Canada.
Wood published many journals on eyes and birds and An introduction to the literature of vertebrate zoology. He was editor of the American Encyclopaedia of Ophthalmology.
Skilled and successful as a practitioner of medicine, he early in life began to show those side interests which are often more determining than anything else in developing a man’s career.
Ray Lyman Wilbur, in the foreword to Casey Wood’s translation of The Art of Falconry by Frederick II of Hohenstaufen.
His best known work was the Fundus Oculi of Birds, published in 1917, which contained 145 drawings and 61 colour plates of the eyes of birds. Wood had noticed that birds could see things that humans could not, and wanted to find out why. He said that birds could see exceptionally well with each eye separately and that they had several areas of acute vision. This allowed them to scan a wide horizon as well as giving them the ability to focus on objects that were indistinct or invisible to other species.
Wood was keen to study documents from the past in order to learn what previous generations knew, and how they had developed their knowledge. He translated The Art of Falconry, a medieval text written by Frederick II of Hohenstaufen in the thirteenth century. However, Wood died before his finished text was published.