Gösta Karpe MD, PhD

✍ Scribed by Sven Erik Nilsson

• Publisher: Springer-Verlag
• Year: 1991
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 354 KB
• Volume: 77
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0012-4486
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00161364

✦ Synopsis

Grsta Karpe, a pioneer in clinical electroretinography and one of the founders of our society, died on September 2, 1990, at age 82, after a long illness.

Professor Karpe's PhD thesis on 'The Basis of Clinical Electroretinography' had a great impact on the European ophthalmologic community. In this work, Karpe described a method for obtaining reliable recordings of the ERG in patients. He constructed a contact lens electrode that made it possible to record the human ERG without damaging the cornea. Consequently, he was able to record and describe the main features of the a-and b-wave responses in several human retinal diseases, such as retinitis pigmentosa and arterial and venous circulatory disturbances. After the thesis was published in the mid-1940s, several other leading European ophthalmologists, such as Franqois, Franceschetti, Henkes and Straub, became interested in clinical electroretin0graphy and began using the same or similar techniques in their laboratories. Because of World War II, however, European and American scientists could not effectively exchange information. Thus, Karpe's work was done independently of Professor Lorrin Riggs' research in the same area, which Karpe, Granit and Franfois (left to right) at the 1984 ISCEV Symposium in Stockholm