John Gustaf Lindberg (22 June 1884 – 23 November 1973) was a Finnish ophthalmologist who was the first to describe exfoliation syndrome, an age-related degenerative disease of the eye that often complicates glaucoma and cataract surgery, in his doctoral thesis that he wrote in St. Petersburg and defended in March 1917 in Helsinki, Finland, at that time a Grand Duchy in the Russian Empire.

The family moved to Helsinki, Grand Duchy of Finland in the early 1890s after his father had been offered a position as the Director of Technology in a recently founded company Kone ja Silta Oy (literally, Machine & Bridge, today Wärtsilä Corporation).

After preparatory studies for three years in botany, zoology, physics and chemistry in the Imperial Alexander University in Finland, he passed the medicophile examination, a mandatory step before applying to the Faculty of Medicine.

By that time, he had made up his mind to become an ophthalmologist after having frequently assisted during his university years in a private eye hospital in Helsinki, run by Johannes Silfvast (1867–1932).

He proposed that Lindberg would explore the theory put forward two years earlier by Karl Theodor Paul Polykarpus Axenfeld (1867–1930) in Freiburg, Germany, according to which pigmentation of the iris would decrease and its transparency increase with the development of cataract.

Lindberg wrote his doctoral thesis in Swedish and entitled it (as translated to English) "Clinical Investigations on Depigmentation of the Pupillary Border and the Translucency of the Iris in Cases of Senile Cataract and in Normal Eyes of Elderly Persons".

The increasing tumult of World War I (1914–1917) brought the young family to Helsinki in 1917 after the February Revolution broke out following significant military setbacks for the Russian Army.

Although travelling abroad in the 1920s was expensive, slow and tedious, Lindberg visited in 1920 to the University of Freiburg, Germany, where he practiced science at its Department of Ophthalmology for one year and took part in clinical work under the guidance of Axenfeld.

[citation needed] In 1921, Lindberg attended for the first time the Nordic Congress of Ophthalmology in Stockholm, Sweden, and met Birger Malling (1884–1989) from Tromsø, Norway, who also was briefed about the thesis.

[1] After returning to Finland in 1923, Lindberg moved his family for three years to Vyborg where he got an appointment as the Chief Physician of a private eye hospital.

No antibiotics or sulfonamides were available so that trachoma was mostly managed by everting the eyelids and rupturing the granules, as well as by topical silver nitrate and zinc sulfate, which was time-consuming.

In 1937, Eivind Hørven (1896–1985), a Norwegian ophthalmologist from the University of Oslo, cited Lindberg's thesis in his paper in the British Journal of Ophthalmology and credited him as the discoverer of exfoliation syndrome.

[citation needed] Lindberg's role was highlighted by Ahti Tarkkanen from University of Helsinki in the second thesis about exfoliation syndrome “Pseudoexfoliation of the Lens Capsule.

[3] In 1989, Tarkkanen and Henrik Forsius from University of Oulu, Finland, published an English translation of Lindberg's thesis as a supplement to Acta Ophthalmologica, so as to make it widely available to researchers.