Kindly take note and report any omissions, inaccuracies, mistakes, and errors to me. Feel free to consult the laudations for ICVS Honorary Life members, Verriest medalists, OSA-Fellows plus the awards winners from CIE, AIC, and ophthalmological and optometric academies. Individuals may be subsumed under more than one heading; please correct as needed. All capsules are liable to change. Your help in filling in the gaps would be much appreciated and would serve us all.
I thank the librarians of the Medical Clinic of the University, Ms. Kim Kirner, Ms. Walz, and Ms. Iris Papke, for their dedicated help. Without their assistance, this list could not have been achieved. I am also indebted to Prof. Charles Sternheim for reading through sections of this list.
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night. (W. Shakespeare)
If you don’t understand the history of your field, you don’t understand your field. (Mitchell Glickstein)
This list is intended to be a living document, as opposed to a fixed-in-time document, for folks to add to over time. Such a document will go a long way toward preventing the loss of scientific history as newer and newer methods of information transfer are established. (Raymond A. Applegate)
Paul E. Meehl (J. Consult. Clin. Psychol. 1978, 46, 806-834) distinguished between fields of science that had a cumulative character (like astronomy and molecular biology) and those that do not, such as what he called the softer fields in psychology, in which "theories rise and decline, come and go, more as a function of baffled boredom than anything else; and the enterprise shows a disturbing absence of that cumulative character". In constructing a list of deceased people who contributed to vision science, it might be a nice exercise to assess the degree to which there has been a lasting impact of old work, that has subsequently been built upon rather than discarded, such that vision science fits in better with fields that have a cumulative character. I think vision science is clearly a cumulative field. This list might help clarify how. (Jonathan Winawer)
The trouble with dead men is that they keep talking to you. But if you ask them a question, they no longer answer. (Giovanni B. Vicario)