Arnold Knapp

Arnold Knapp was born in the City and graduated from Harvard in 1889. He took his medical degree from Columbia’s P. and S. in 1892. He was Professor of Ophthalmology there from 1903 to 1928. All that is known about eyes, their structure and their maladies, he knew. He was the Dean of American Oculists. In 1931 Columbia awarded him an honorary degree. In his life he probably did more to prevent blindness than any other man who ever lived; and now that he has died his Knapp Memorial Foundation continues his research and teaching in ophthalmology under the guidance of his successors.

The amount of work done by Arnold Knapp was prodigious. He was director of a hospital for more than 30 years, Professor of Ophthalmology at Columbia for 25 years, Editor of the Archives of Ophthalmology (founded by his father the year Arnold was born) for 40 years. In the meantime he found time to conduct a large practice, to write more than 200 papers, to publish a classic book on Medical Ophthalmology, to indulge his interest in music, literature, and art, and to add to his remarkable collection of Chinese bronzes.

Knapp was the illustrious product of his time. He lived through the great physics discoveries of the latter nineteenth century. The work of Donders on refraction and of Roentgen on x-rays wheeled on the stage when he was very young, and he was thoroughly familiar with all that was going on in the laboratories in England, Germany, and America, and he knew personally most of the great scientists of the age. When experimental techniques and instruments have been refined to a certain point, a higher level of understanding is attained, and this is the point where it is vital to have men like Knapp, with the power to interpret new data and apply them so that the blind shall see and he that runs may read.

George W. Martin
1957 Century Association Yearbook