David C. Knight, MD, a general surgeon who has practiced at Waterbury Hospital for more than 25 years, has been named the hospital’s “2011 Humanitarian of the Year” for his work bringing medical supplies and expertise to underdeveloped countries across the globe.
Knight, who is the Associate Program Director of Waterbury Hospital’s General Surgery Residency Program, has helped save countless lives over the past several years through a non-profit organization he founded that provides much-needed surgical “loupes” to surgeons in Third World countries. Loupes, which are commonplace in the U.S. and other developed nations, are high-tech optical glasses that allow surgeons to identify and focus on minute details during the course of a procedure.
In 2006, while touring hospitals and medical clinics in Vietnam and Cambodia, Knight developed a friendship with a Cambodian plastic surgeon who told him he routinely conducted procedures without the assistance of loupes. The encounter prompted Knight to form Loupes Around the World, an organization that works to raise donations to provide loupes to surgeons in Third World countries. Since then, the organization has provided 182 loupes to surgeons in more than 42 countries.
Besides his work raising money for loupes, Knight has also taken part in several humanitarian missions to the African nation of Liberia, which is recovering from a recent civil war that decimated much of its medical infrastructure. Before the war, the country had over 400 physicians treating a population of over 3.5 million; after the war, there were only 50 physicians remaining, six of them surgeons. Knight has conducted four missions to the country, providing badly needed assistance and teaching to Liberian physicians working in the country’s largest hospital in the capital of Monrovia.
Knight will be recognized during the hospital’s 12th Annual Charity Gala on Saturday, November 19 at the Villa Rosa (Ponte Club)
(Credit Ronald DeRosa)
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