With grateful thanks to Alison T. McCall, genealogist, for finding this information about Ida while helping me with research into her brother WW1 poet Arthur James Mann.
Ida was "a distinguished ophthalmologist ... equally well known for her pioneering research work on embryology and development of the eye, and on the influences of genetic and social factors on the incidence and severity of eye disease throughout the world". She was the first woman to be appointed as a surgeon to the Royal London Ophthalmic Hospital - Moorfields.
Educated at Wycombe House School, Hampstead, London, Ida passed the Civil Service Girl Clerk's examination and took a job at the Post Office Savings Bank. She then applied to study medicine at the London School of Medicine for Women, the only medical school which was open to women at that time. She passed the matriculation examination in 1914, one of only eight women out of hundreds of passes, completed her studies, 'with no trouble and intense delight', and qualified Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery (MB, BS) in 1920.
Ida gained experience during the First World War at Fulham Military Hospital, and became a demonstrator in physiology. In 1917 she transferred to St Mary’s Hospital, where she studied embryology with Professor J. E. S. Frazer. She graduated from the University of London (MB, BS, 1920; D.Sc., 1928) and, qualifying as a member in 1920 (fellow in 1927) of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, she was appointed ophthalmic house surgeon at St Mary’.
In 1939, Ida visited Australia as the British Medical Association's representative at the 1st Annual General Meeting of the Ophthalmological Society of Australia (B.M.A.). She flew in an Imperial Airways Flying Boat, which took a week to fly at low altitude from Southampton to Melbourne. On 30 December 1944, Ida married widower Professor William Ewart Gye, director of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, at the register office, Brentford, Middlesex.
Following Gye’s retirement in 1949 due to ill health and, opposed to the nationalisation of medicine, Mann stepped down from her post at Moorfields. The couple travelled to Australia and settled in Perth, where Mann set up a small private practice and became a consultant at Royal Perth Hospital. She also helped her husband with cancer research. After William's death in 1952, Ida travelled widely in outback Australia at the request of the Western Australian Public Health Department and the Royal Flying Doctor Service, compiling records of the incidence of eye diseases, especially trachoma, among Aborigines. Ida died on 18 November 1983 in Perth, Western Australia.
Ida's Publications
Ida Mann, The Development of the Human Eye (Cambridge, 1928)
Ida Mann, Developmental Abnormalities of the Eye (Cambridge, 1937)
Ida Mann and Antoinette Pirie, The Science of Seeing (Harmondsworth, 1946)
Ida Mann, Culture, Race, Climate and Eye Disease (Illinois, 1966)
As Caroline Gye, The Cockney and the Crocodile (London, 1962)
As Caroline Gye, China 13 (London, 1964)
Sources:
https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/mann-dame-ida-caroline-14894
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ida_Man
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1442-9071.1984.tb01134.x
