About Us | The Story of P. Kenneth Gieser and the Wheaton Eye Clinic

When P. Kenneth Gieser decided to give up a promising big city ophthalmology career in Chicago to move to the sleepy little suburb of Wheaton in l942, some thought he was foolish. His world-class, specialized training, they said, should be part of a large and prestigious teaching institution. Who would ever find him in Wheaton? How could he hope to support his family?

His answer stunned everyone. People from around the world would find him, he explained. They would come as patients and as colleagues, helping to build a clinic providing the finest eye care in the world but in an atmosphere of compassion and encouragement. His vision, as he later explained, was merely the next step on a life path that he and his wife Kay knew was being directed by God. His story is inspiring, especially now, sixty years later, because people from around the world do come to the Wheaton Eye Clinic, just as he predicted. And doctors from the Wheaton Eye Clinic still go out into the mission field to serve, just as Dr. Gieser himself did.

A native of Chicago, Kenneth Gieser attended Wheaton College. Next came Northwestern Medical School, marriage to his wife, Kay, and many exciting and rewarding years working in missionary hospitals in China. But eventually severe bouts with pneumonia, two types of malaria and resultant heart complications, combined with civil war in China, forced him to give up his beloved mission fieldwork. Advised to concentrate in a medical specialty that would allow him to protect his own health, Dr. Gieser moved his wife and two sons to Wheaton and sought additional training in ophthalmology in Chicago.

In 1942, anxious to raise his children in the community he and Kay had loved during their college days, Dr. Gieser began his practice in Wheaton. For $2.50 a week, he rented part of a dentist's reception room at 214 N. Hale, holding office hours for two hours, two nights a week. He worked alone with a cardboard box of used equipment and lots of determination. When World War II began and his landlord was drafted, Dr. Gieser found himself with the full suite of offices and a practice that was building nicely.

As the needs of his Wheaton patients developed, Dr. Gieser made certain his clinic grew and changed to meet them. By 1945 he was serving patients full time and in 1952 he was joined by Dr. R. Elliot Politser, a leading optometrist and specialist in contact lenses, a technology, which was barely known outside medical circles.

By l953 the second part of Dr. Gieser's vision became reality. Because of his missionary experiences, Dr. Gieser wanted to use his clinic as a place for missionary doctors to spend time working during furloughs from overseas mission assignments. And Dr. Gieser wanted to make his clinic a place where doctors would be encouraged to get away from their practice and spend some time as short-term missionary doctors. So, in 1953 Dr. Gieser took charge of the Kano Eye Hospital in Kano, Nigeria, W. Africa for two months while its founder and superintendent, Dr. Douglas Hursh, took over Dr. Gieser's Wheaton practice. Thus began the longstanding tradition of short-term missionary work by Wheaton Eye Clinic doctors. Through the years, its doctors have served patients in such places as Peru, Nigeria, India, Pakistan, Turkey, Russia, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Afghanistan, Uganda, France, Mainland China, Mongolia, Bolivia, Ghana, Cameroon, Kenya and Ukraine.

By 1955 the clinic faced the first of its several building projects. Six rooms were added to the existing building and a second full-time ophthalmologist was added to the clinic staff. By 1958 contact lenses had become universally popular and a separate contact lens department was opened; two years later another doctor joined the flourishing practice. As the practice grew, so did the offices; two separate facilities were built and outgrown in rapid succession.

The 1970's saw two significant new trends in ophthalmology: the recognition of ophthalmology subspecialties and the use of lasers in surgery. Wheaton Eye Clinic eagerly embraced both. In 1970 Dr. Richard Gieser, Kenneth Gieser's oldest son, became the group's first subspecialist after completing a fellowship in retinal surgery. As patient needs expanded so did the clinic's addition of subspecialists in such areas as corneal diseases, corneal surgery and external diseases of the eye, glaucoma and pediatric ophthalmology. At the same time, Wheaton Eye Clinic was among the first in Illinois to introduce lasers for the successful treatment of eye disease.

By 1979 the clinic again needed new quarters, not only to accommodate its own growth, but to house a newly-formed sister organization. As part of Dr. Gieser's overriding commitment to service, the Wheaton Eye Foundation was started in 1979 to help sustain ongoing medical missions work as well as to operate the newly created Deicke Center for Visual Rehabilitation. This unique center, which continues today, was started partly as a result of Dr. Gieser's own experience with low vision problems associated with macular degeneration, the most common degenerative eye condition for people over sixty. The Deicke Center helps low-vision patients learn to use specialized tools and appliances in order to function independently at home and around the community. Just as importantly, the center provides counseling services to help patients master coping techniques necessary for lifestyle changes.

So, once again the clinic expanded. This time Dr. Gieser was pleased to find the perfect site, 5 1/2 acres at 2015 N. Main Street, where an award-winning facility, triple the size of the old one, was designed and built in 1980. At its dedication, Dr. Gieser said simply, "Let our work and service to others speak of our faith." By the summer of 1983 Dr. Gieser, himself battling the effects of macular degeneration, retired. He left a staff of more than a dozen subspecialists, including his sons, Dr. Richard Gieser and Dr. David Gieser, a glaucoma specialist. On August 1, l987, Dr. Gieser died but his guiding influence and enduring dream have lived on as evidenced by the clinic's continuing successes.

Settled in its spacious new building, the clinic continued to build its subspecialties services. By l990, it was the only organization in the Chicago area with doctors in each of 12 ophthalmology subspecialties. Even as the clinic added subspecialists, more people were becoming patients, some from outside the Chicagoland area, but many came from what seemed to be pockets within the western suburbs. Recognizing the need to better serve these patients, Wheaton Eye Clinic opened satellite locations in Glen Ellyn, Elgin and a new, state-of-the-art facility in Naperville.

Today, sixty years after Dr. Kenneth Gieser first opened his doors, Wheaton Eye Clinic has surpassed in breadth and depth of expertise all the larger Chicago institutions Dr. Gieser's associates had so long ago told him he should not abandon. The Clinic is a preferred referral center for doctors throughout the Midwest and there are Wheaton Eye Clinic doctors teaching at all of the medical schools in Chicago. The Clinic continues to grow as a full-service provider of eye care services with 20 medical doctors specializing in ophthalmology, seven full time optometrists with the eyeglass and contact lens departments and over 100 other staff employees. Wheaton Eye Clinic is the largest private ophthalmology practice in Illinois with over 90,000 patient visits a year.