Eduard Bøckmann

Eduard Bøckmann (8 March 1849 – 8 August 1927) was a Norwegian American ophthalmologist, physician and inventor.

Background Eduard Bøckmann was born in Østre Toten Municipality in Christians county, Norway. He was the son of Daniel Peter Barth Bøckmann (1793–1877) and Dina Severine Dreier (1811–1885). He enrolled as a student in 1867 and graduated with the cand.med. degree in 1874. He married Anne Sophie Dorothea Gill in Kaupanger in September 1875. He settled in Bergen and worked there until 1886. During this period, in 1882 he took the dr.med. degree on the thesis Om den ved Trigeminusanæsthesi forekommende Hornhindelidelses Væsen og Aarsager. The ailments he described often occurred in leprosy patients. Bøckmann had spent a year from 1880 to 1881 as a physician at a lepra institution. His was the first Norwegian doctoral thesis in medicine whose research had been conducted outside the proximity of the University of Kristiania. Also, in Bergen he involved himself in the local medical society, Bergens Medicinske Selskap. In 1884 he co-founded the journal Medicinsk Revue, which existed until 1939.

Career In 1886, Bøckmann immigrated to the United States, reportedly seeking "grander conditions". leading a field hospital in Jacksonville, Florida for three months. He also invented a new type of catgut, which came into mass production in 1901. In 1901 he donated a book collection to the Ramsey County Medical Society library. He decided that proceedings from the sale of the catgut business should be used for a foundation to fund the library. The sale took place long after his death in 1959, and the library was named after Bøckmann.

Bøckmann also led a fundraiser among Norwegian-Americans at the University of Kristiania centennial anniversary in 1911. For this, he received an honorary degree there. He was also proclaimed a Commander of the Royal Norwegian Order of St. Olav, having been a Knight of the Order since 1907.

Bøckmann died in 1927 after suffering a heart attack at the home of his son, Egil Boeckmann, in Dellwood, Minnesota.

Selected works Some Remarks about Asepsis in Military Service (1895) The Ramsey County Medical Society: Its Past, Present, and Future (1900)