Harold Glendon Scheie; Founder of Scheie Eye Institute

Harold Glendon Scheie, 80, founder and former director of the Scheie Eye Institute of Philadelphia who helped develop the diagnostic test for myasthenia gravis in the late 1930s. Scheie was the first to describe in detail a rare, inherited metabolic disease that can cloud the cornea, now called Scheie’s syndrome. He was also responsible for the development of key surgical techniques, including the treatment of congenital cataracts and glaucoma. Many of today’s ophthalmologic instruments and procedures bear his name, including the Scheie procedure used in glaucoma surgery. Scheie was a native of Brookings, S.D. He graduated with honors in 1935 from the University of Minnesota School of Medicine, and later moved to Philadelphia, where he died on Monday of cancer.