Dr. Crohn was born in Manhattan on June 13, 1884. He received a B.A. degree from the City College of New York in 1902 and his medical degree from the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1907. For most of his professional life, Dr. Crohn was associated with the Mount Sinai Medical Center. It was there, with two associates, that in 1932 he produced a report hailed as a major advance in the identification and definition of ileitis, an inflammation of the intestinal tract.
Dr. Crohn was also among the first physicians to hold that many gastric and intestinal ailments were the result of anxiety, stress or neuroses rather than actual organic disorders.
He joined Mount Sinai as an intern in 1907 and in 1920 was named the first head of the department of gastroenterology there. He was also named a consultant in gastroenterology at Columbia University in 1946, after having been on the staff there since 1920. A consultant in gastroenterology at Mount Sinai since 1945, he was named consultant emeritus in 1982.
Because of his eminence in the field, Dr. Crohn was widely consulted by the press when President Dwight D. Eisenhower was stricken with ileitis in 1956. Although not a member of the surgical team that attended the President, he sought to assure the public that the President should recover without difficulty.
Dr. Crohn wrote three books and more than 100 articles for professional journals. The books were ''Affections of the Stomach'' (1927), ''Understand Your Ulcer'' (1943) and ''Regional Ileitis'' (1947, second edition 1958). Native New Yorker. He lectured and attended medical conferences around the world. He was among those who felt that the name Crohn's disease was inappropriate despite its almost universal use. His own preferences were for regional ileitis, regional enteritis or cicatrizing enterocolitis.
Dr. Crohn was awarded the Townsend Harris Medal by City College in 1948, the Julius Friedenthal Medal of the American Gastroenterological Association, of which he was a past president, in 1953 and Mount Sinai Hospital's Jacobi Medal in 1962.