After nearly 20 years, longtime Durango resident and ophthalmologist Dr. David Bishop retired Monday from Four Corners Eye Care, ultimately because of a cardiac arrhythmia diagnosis. At 84, Bishop said his retirement is premature, and that the plan was to retire at 85, after one more year at the practice.
In hometown Bartlesville, Oklahoma, Bishop discovered his love for science during a chemistry class senior year of high school. He completed his medical education at Oklahoma A&M (now Oklahoma State University) and the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine, ophthalmology residency at Galveston, Texas, and two fellowships in Alabama and Long Island, New York. To his relief, he was not drafted for military service during the Korean War, and Bishop, with his wife, Anne Marie, started a family. They have two daughters, Dianne and Carolyn, and two sons, Bill and Tim.
Bishop returned to Oklahoma to work as a professor in the ophthalmology department at OU. At the time, he didn’t feel he was the person to bring about a groundbreaking medical discovery at the university and left the position. He and his family moved to Durango in 1968, and he became one of the town’s 29 medical doctors.
Bishop said that Durango was the only place in the Four Corners that provided ophthalmology services for cataracts, strabismus (crossed eyes), kicks to the face by mules, etc.
Sometime in 1973, Bishop was contacted by an ophthalmologist, Dr. Griest, a United States citizen who ran a clinic in Mombasa, Kenya. The doctor needed to return to the U.S. for three months and asked Bishop to run the Mombasa clinic while he was gone. In the summer of 1974, Bishop decided he would leave with his wife and four children to spend three months in Kenya.
Bishop worked at the clinic and gave sermons via a translator, while his wife fitted glasses for people and taught Sunday Bible school. He returned to the U.S. with a new perspective on eye surgery. In the U.S., cataracts surgery would keep patients in the hospital for days of preparation and recovery, which seemed like a waste of much-needed space and time after performing surgeries in Kenya.
“In Mombasa, the patient would show up at the clinic and I would perform the eye surgery. He would take an aspirin after I was done then head back into the bush,” said Bishop. Although he knew the system would not change, he felt obligated to share with the medical community that not all eye-surgery patients require days of attention before and after operations.
The trip to Kenya eventually led to a series of two-week-long “mission trips” Bishop took with his wife during the 1990s to perform eye surgeries all over the world, including Latin America, China and Iraq. He sterilized medical equipment from an operating room in Durango and they carried everything with them, including about 2,000 pairs of glasses, while they traveled. After the 14th and final mission trip to Iraq, he returned to Durango and settled back into the community.
Bishop will continue to give educational talks about ophthalmology at Four Corners Eye Care, 575 Rivergate, Suite 212.
fstone@durangoherald.com
