John Zachariah Laurence

John Zachariah Laurence (1829 – 18 July 1870) was an English ophthalmologist who practiced medicine in London.

[1] With Jabez Spence Ramskill (1824–1897) the first physician, Charles Edouard Brown-Séquard, William Fergusson, Surgeon Extraordinary to Queen Victoria, Laurence was one of only four medical staff who founded the Hospital for the Paralysed and Epileptic at Queen (now the National Hospital) in 1860.

In 1866 he described a syndrome of retinitis pigmentosa, loss of vision progressing to blindness, mental retardation, stunted stature and hypogonadism.

For reasons uncertain his work was undervalued as Arnold Sorsby's (1900–1980) belated obituary reveals: Laurence was well and truly interred by his contemporaries.

He may have helped to introduce the ophthalmoscope developed by Hermann von Helmholtz (1851) at Queen Square.2(p .363) His name remains only in the rare, eponymous Laurence-Moon-Biedl syndrome.