He will forever be missed
Dr. Stephen Drance
Dr. Stephen Drance (May 22, 1925 – September 2, 2020)
Hall of Honour Presentation of Dr. Stephen Drance
By Fred Mikelberg
Dr. Drance was born in Bielsko, Poland in 1925. He emigrated to the United Kingdom in the1930’s where he completed his secondary school education. He pursued his medical school education at the University of Edinburgh and received his diploma in ophthalmology in 1953. He continued further ophthalmology training centered on the diagnosis and treatment of glaucoma in York, Edinburgh, and Oxford.
Dr. Drance moved to Canada in 1957 where he set up practice as an Assistant Professor at the University of Saskatchewan. In 1963 he relocated to Vancouver and established his practice at the Vancouver General Hospital and was appointed as Associate Professor in the UBC Department of Ophthalmology. In 1966 he was promoted to Full Professor and in 1973 was appointed as Head of the UBC Department of Ophthalmology as well as Head of the VGH Department. He served in these roles until his retirement in 1990. He served as President of the Glaucoma Research Society from 1982-1990. He is one of the 69 Charter Members of the American Glaucoma Society. He served as President of the Canadian Ophthalmological Society.
He is renowned as a clinician-scientist, educator, and administrator.
As a clinician-scientist he has published over 300 publications. His work has made a significant impact on the diagnosis and treatment of glaucoma. Although his interests were prolific, two topics should be noted. In 1970 he was the first (in collaboration with his colleague, Dr. Begg) to note the importance of disc hemorrhages in the patient with glaucoma. To this day this finding is still called a “Drance Hemorrhage”. In 1998, in collaboration with his friend and colleague, Dr. Anderson at the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute, he designed and completed the first multi-centre randomized trial comparing IOP lowering to observation in patients with normal pressure glaucoma. This work lead to the publication of a series of 5 papers looking at the efficacy of IOP lowering in this disease., its natural history, and predictors of progression and of treatment success. The findings of this study remain as relevant today as when first published.
As an educator he trained over 35 glaucoma fellows who now practice worldwide. There is unlikely a continent that does not include a Drance fellow as one of its glaucoma physicians.
Ophthalmology at VGH was scattered over multiple small and inadequate spaces. Dr. Drance therefore designed and raised the funds, in collaboration with VGH and the Provincial Government, to build the VGH/UBC Eye Care Centre which opened its doors in 1983. It provides a single address in which clinicians practice and perform surgery, medical students, residents and fellows are taught, diagnostic tests are performed, and basic scientists carry out their research. Previous to the opening of this centre, cataract surgery was only performed in a main OR in-patient setting. This facility had two free standing day care OR’s to move cataract surgery into the modern era. It was the first multi-user free-standing surgical cataract suite in Canada and became a model emulated around the world.
He has been recognized worldwide with multiple visiting lectureships, fellowships, and honorary degrees including delivering the prestigious Goldmann lecture at the 1994 meeting of the Glaucoma Research Society, and the inaugural American Glaucoma Society Lecture in 1987. He received the Canadian Ophthalmological Society Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008. He was appointed as an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1987 and in 2012 he received the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal.
Personally as a Drance Fellow, 1983-1984, it is truly my honor and pleasure to have nominated my teacher, mentor, and friend to the Vancouver General Hospital Medical Staff Hall of Honour.
VIEW the Introduction of Stephen Drance at the World Glaucoma Congress, 2013 by Gordon Douglas