I just got a mass mailed e-mail from one of the medical journalism companies, maybe Medscape or Doximity. It said that Frank Scribbick died.
Dr. Scribbick was an ophthalmic pathologist well known for running the San Antonio Ophthalmology course, a review course in March, as well as teaching at the Lancaster summer ophthalmology course. He was a legend. He apparently had a heart attack while swimming in the ocean in Colombia while on vacation. He died in July.
In my mind, Dr. Scribbick and Dr. Ralph Eagle were the two ocular pathology stars known to many residents but now the younger guy
Dr. Scribbick was only 64, not even Medicare age
MBA
Dr. Frank Scribbick III — A Giant Who Showed Up at Midnight
Just saw this today, March 14, 2026 from Gonio5. I am so sad.
Dr. Frank Scribbick passed away unexpectedly in July. He was 64. Far too soon.
If you trained in ophthalmology anywhere near San Antonio, you knew Frank. He ran the San Antonio Ophthalmology Course, taught ophthalmic pathology at the Lancaster Course in Maine, directed the Lions Eye Pathology Lab at UT Health San Antonio, and shaped more ophthalmology residents than anyone could count. He and Dr. Ralph Eagle were the two titans of ocular pathology in the minds of a generation of trainees.
But I didn’t know Frank as a legend. I knew him as the guy who answered his phone at 10 PM on a cold, stormy night in San Antonio when a dumb intern called because his car was floating down a flooded ravine.
I was a transitional year intern at Brooke Army Medical Center — young, broke, and apparently too foolish to avoid a flooded street. My car became a raft. I climbed out, stood in the rain, and called Frank. By midnight, he was there with his truck, pulling my vehicle out of the ditch and towing it back to my house, where it eventually needed a new engine.
That’s who he was. Not “Dr. Scribbick, Clinical Professor of Ophthalmology.” Just Frank — the guy who shows up. For an intern he barely knew. At midnight. In a storm.
He and his wife were immensely generous to me during those years. How many nights did I sit at their table talking about life, about ophthalmology, about what kind of doctor I wanted to become? He was the person who made me want to be an ophthalmologist. And years later, when I found myself training residents and writing board review material, I realized his fingerprints were all over that impulse too. He was my muse for teaching.
Frank was a fellow Army officer, a flight surgeon who served in Korea, a Brooke Army residency graduate, a man of deep faith who gave free eye exams through I Care San Antonio and showed up early on Saturday mornings to tend his church grounds. He was salt of the earth in the truest, most literal sense.
The world of ophthalmology education lost something irreplaceable. I lost a mentor and a friend.
Rest easy, Frank.
— John Pemberton, DO, MBA
