Pollak, Simon (1816–1903)
Simon Pollak was born near Prague, Bohemia, April 14, 1816, and received his M. D. there in 1835, and certificates for surgery and obstetrics in Vienna, 1836. Arriving in New York in 1838, he spent a short time in New Orleans and in other southern towns, and in March, 1845, settled in St. Louis, Missouri, where he was one of the founders of the Missouri Institute for the Blind in 1850. In 1859 he went to Europe and spent almost two years in study in Paris, Vienna, Berlin, and London, returning to St. Louis in 1861. On account of the Civil War he removed to New York and aided in the founding of the United States Sanitary Commission. On behalf of this society he returned to St. Louis, where he joined the Western Sanitary Commission. About this time he organized the first eye and ear clinic west of the Mississippi, in St. Louis. He invented a scleral puncture in painful glaucomatous eyes that, being properly performed, saved many a disfiguring enucleation. In 1863 he was appointed general hospital inspector United States Sanitary Commission at a salary of two hundred and fifty dollars a month, a position he accepted, but declined the salary.
He married in 1863 a daughter of Samuel Perry, of Cincinnati, and had two sons.
One of the early members of the American Ophthalmological Society, he was known as a prominent oculist and teacher, active and very popular throughout his unusually long life. At his last birthday his friends and colleagues tendered him a great ovation at a dinner.
He died October 31, 1903.