Lucy Mathen (born 1953) is an Indian-born British ophthalmologist and former journalist. Having initially worked for the BBC, she retrained as a doctor and launched Second Sight – a non-profit organisation aimed at curing cataract blindness in India's poorest state, Bihar.

Life

Mathen began her career as a print journalist, working for the Surrey Mirror in the mid-1970s.^[1] She became the British Broadcasting Corporation's first ever female British Asian to front a major national television programme in 1976 when she began working for John Craven's Newsround (the BBC's children's news series).^[2] She was the programme's first dedicated reporter – others, such as the anchorman John Craven, also appeared in other presenting roles for the BBC.^[3] She worked on Newsround from 1976 to 1980. During this period, Samira Ahmed, now a prominent British Asian broadcaster, found Mathen an inspiration.^[2]

During the making of a documentary on women in Afghanistan in 1988, a conversation with a local doctor made her reconsider her journalistic role: "I suddenly felt like a bit of a fraud. That's when I vowed that if I were ever in a war zone again, I would be a medic and not a reporter". At the age of 36, she retrained as a doctor at St George's Hospital Medical School in London. St. George's Hospital Medical School.^[4] She chose ophthalmology as her specialty. After taking part in a surgical training course in India in 1996, she saw the effects of blindness caused by cataracts. She launched a non-profit organisation – Second Sight – in December 2000 to bring eye surgeons into the rural north India where the problem was most acute.^[5] In 2012 she received the inaugural Karen Woo award from the British Medical Journal for the charity's work in Bihar. In 2020, in spite of the Covid pandemic and lockdowns, over 43,000 people had their sight restored by Second Sight working with small community eye hospitals all over the state of Bihar. The total number of blind people who have benefitted from the charity's work is now well over half a million. She has written about her change of career and the first 10 years of the charity's work in a book called A Runaway Goat: Curing Blindness in Forgotten India.^[6] A sequel called Outgrowing the Big: Sight for India's Blind and A New Way of Seeing the World was published in June 2019. Award-winning journalist Simon Barnes, reviewing OTB called the book a 'triumph' -'humanity is the super-power that has allowed the charity Second Sight to punch way above its weight in 18 years.' OTB is dedicated to Mathen's greatest inspiration - her late mother Monica. She wrote her obituary which appeared in The Guardian newspaper in 2018. The book is also dedicated to Mark Rees, her partner of 50 years. They have one son Calum and one daughter Leyla. It was Leyla who introduced her to playing football which she still plays regularly and has incorporated the encouragement of women's football in India as part of a programme discouraging child marriage.^[7] She is also a keen runner and completed three London Marathons and a half-marathon, and a triathlon raising money for Second Sight in the process.^[8] She plays bass guitar in the band Startled Saint which she and Mark formed with friends in the 1970s.

In 2017, she launched the FAME project, which aims to eliminate vitamin A deficiency and the resulting blindness in children in economically backward areas of India.^[9] FAME stands for Food, Vitamin A, Measles vaccination, and Education.^[9] In July 2022 Mathen's Medical School - St George's University of London- conferred on her an honorary degree of Doctor of Medicine (DSc(Med)) for services to Ophthalmology.

References

External links

• Second Sight