One hundred important 20th-century ophthalmic books.

We have been aware from the beginning that the mere act of providing such a list is to ask for dissent and disparagement. To start with, what does “important” mean? Does it just mean popular? Is DukeElder on the list just because a lot of copies of his book were sold? It is our hope to call a book important when there seems to be some agreement that the book has made a significant contribution to ophthalmic knowledge or practice. We concede that it often takes time for the word to get around about the excellence or significance of a certain book. This means that when a consensus has been reached, there may well have been quite a few copies sold. Some books published in the last decade of the 20th century will continue to be useful and popular well into the 21st century, but so far they have only had time to put their stamp on the 1990s. For this reason, we have found it hard to evaluate them as 20th-century monuments. By the year 2020, a general agreement may have finally been reached about the importance of these books. If our list is slightly weighted toward the first half of the century, this delay may have been a contributing factor. By the same token, some books first written in the 1890s continued, through new editions, to have a major influence into the 20th century, and we have included a few of these on our list. The result is that our definition of the 20th century is a little fuzzy at both ends. Another problem with our list is that many of the most significant contributions to ophthalmic knowledge were first offered in professional journals, and the author never got around to writing a book on the subject. Ours is unabashedly a list of books. One might well object that books are just one kind of retrievable information package, so why not consider all such packages in every kind of database? Our first answer is that we are fond of books. Books are not only discrete, compact, and accessible, they also can be attractive because their physical qualities appeal to some of our other senses. The palpable heft of the book, the feel of the binding and the paper, the art and skill of the typography and illustrations are all part of “reading” a book. A book comes saturated with the personality and voice of the author; it is designed to be held in its owner’s hands and to be read, shelved, and reread as needed. Our second reason is that we have to draw the line somewhere, and by limiting ourselves to books we have sidestepped the impossible task of writing a comprehensive history of ideas in 20thcentury ophthalmology. We have asked many others to give us their choices, but in the end this is our personal list, tilted inevitably by our own personal American exposure to ophthalmic books and by our inclination toward the English language. We have made no attempt From the Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences, University of Iowa, Iowa City (Dr Thompson), and Oregon Health Sciences University, Portland (Dr Blanchard). SPECIAL ARTICLE