View from the Hight Street: Raising our profile

During my second year at university, I used a search engine called Webcrawler to check out a website selling books online. It was recommended to me by Professor Steve Parish, a great man who has inspired and shaped so many careers in our profession. He also let me swap a clinic group so I could watch Wales play Samoa in the Rugby World Cup that year – I’ll let you look up the result on a contemporary search engine but suffice to say I’d rather have been refining my ‘fan and block’.

The book I bought was the third edition of Clinical Ocular Pharmacology (still on my shelf with the fifth edition – a pre-reg made off with the fourth edition circa 2006) and the website was called Amazon. It was the first I’d heard of it. This was also the year I became aware of internet dispensing. There had long been so called ‘bucket shops’ and mail order spectacle purchases but this online element was new.