Charles Usher

Charles Howard Usher (* 1865 in Edinburgh, † 1942) was a Scottish ophthalmologist and is the namesake of Usher syndrome, a hereditary blind numbness disease.

Charles Usher, was born in 1865 as the fourth child of a large family in Edinburgh. He completed his medical studies at the University of Cambridge and at St. Thomas 's Hospital in London, which he successfully completed in 1891. Subsequently he worked as a surgeon in Edinburgh for the famous in his time ophthalmologist Edward Nettleship and as ophthalmologist in hospitals Aberdeen Royal Infirmary and Royal Aberdeen Hospital for Sick Children until his retirement in 1926.

Inspired by Nettleship examined Charles Usher, among other eye diseases in the population of the Scottish Highlands. In 1914 he published a study of retinitis pigmentosa. Herein, he noted that 19 of the 69 affected patients had a degree of hearing loss. The results of this study it was years later, again in the Bowman lecture the Society of British Ophthamologen before, but without mentioning this relationship again. As a result, the name " Usher" was used as the eponymous syndromes associated with retinitis pigmentosa and hearing loss.