Background
Frederick Irving Knight, the son of Frederick and Anne (Goodwin) Knight, was born on May 18, 1841 in Newburyport, Massachusetts, United States.
Frederick Irving Knight, the son of Frederick and Anne (Goodwin) Knight, was born on May 18, 1841 in Newburyport, Massachusetts, United States.
Knight received his preliminary education in the Newburyport high school and graduated from Yale College in 1862. After receiving the degree of Doctor of Medicine from Harvard in 1866, he served as an interne in the Boston City Hospital.
Knight worked for a year under Austin Flint in New York. Returning to Boston, he became assistant to Dr. Henry I. Bowditch. His association with these eminent authorities was due to his early and continued interest in diseases of the chest, and to these men he owed much of his subsequent success as a diagnostician in diseases of the respiratory tract. In 1871 he gave up his work with Bowditch and went abroad to pursue his studies in Berlin and Vienna. Four years previously Dr. H. K. Oliver, one of the visiting physicians to the Massachusetts General Hospital, had instituted instruction in laryngology as a branch of clinical medicine in the Harvard Medical School, and while Knight was yet in Europe in 1872, he was appointed instructor in auscultation, percussion, and laryngoscopy in that institution.
On his return to the United States a few months later he established a clinic at the Massachusetts General Hospital in order to obtain clinical material for his classes. Several years later laryngoscopy had so developed that the teaching of percussion and auscultation was taken out of Knight's province and thenceforth he taught laryngology solely. In 1882 his title was changed from instructor to assistant professor, and in 1886 he was appointed clinical professor.
A brilliant younger man, Dr. Franklin H. Hooper, was associated with him as instructor in laryngology. Hooper developed a malignant growth of the tongue and neck, and in 1892 in order that his younger colleague might be promoted before his death, Knight resigned his professorship in Hooper's favor, although he knew that when Hooper died he himself would probably not be able to resume the position. This proved to be the case and Knight never taught publicly again.
He was one of the founders of the American Laryngological Association in 1878, and at its first regular meeting in 1879 read the first paper on the program, a discussion of retro-pharyngeal sarcoma. He was the third man elected to the presidency of the Association and until his death took the deepest interest in its affairs. When the Archives of Laryngology was established in 1880, he was one of the most active of its promoters and one of the four men who composed the editorial staff. He was also a pioneer in the early days of the war against tuberculosis.
Knight served as president of the American Laryngological Association, American Climatological Association and of the Boston Society for Medical Improvement.
On October 15, 1871, while in Berlin, Knight married Louisa Armistead Appleton, daughter of William Stuart Appleton of Baltimore. They had one daughter.