The hospital was founded in 1814 on the initiative of William James Wilson and opened in King Street the following year.[1] It moved to Faulkner Street in 1827, to Princess Street in 1874 and to St John's Street in 1882, before re-locating to a facility designed by Pennington & Bridgen in Oxford Road which was built between 1884 and 1886.[1] The building was damaged by a large bomb in the German air raid on 23 December 1940. A doctor and a nurse were killed.[2] The building became Grade II listed in 1974 and has since been converted for other uses.[3]
Services moved to a new building on the Royal Infirmary site accessible to patients in 2009 and officially opened by the Queen in 2012.[4] Meanwhile, a new biomedical centre, Citylabs, was constructed on the old site, using both the frontage of the old Royal Eye Hospital building and a new 94,000 sq ft building at the rear, also opening in 2012.[5]
In November 2013 the Macular Society conducted a survey of NHS trusts not meeting critical four-week follow-up times to administer drugs that reverse or arrest macular degeneration and found that the hospital was struggling because it had "experienced a significant increase in demand coinciding with the introduction of a new treatment for patients with macular degeneration."[6]
Consultant Ophthalmologist Paulo Stanga fitted the world's first visual prosthesis, an Argus retinal prosthesis for a patient with age-related macular degeneration to Ray Flynn, 80, in July 2015 at the hospital. He is the first person in the world to have both artificial and natural vision combined.[7] Professor Stanga said "As far as I am concerned, the first results of the trial are a total success and I look forward to treating more dry AMD patients with the Argus II as part of this trial. We are currently recruiting four more patients to the trial in Manchester."[8]
