Hans Wagner

Hans Wagner was a Swiss ophthalmologist, born in Zurich in 1905 and living until 1989. He is remembered as the first person to describe a hereditary eye disorder in which the vitreous gel and the retina degenerate together, which he reported in 1938 in a German-language article titled Ein bisher ungekanntes Erbleiden des Auges, meaning a previously unknown hereditary disease of the eye, based on cases he observed in the canton of Zurich. In 1966 the Dutch ophthalmologist L. Jansen suggested that the disease be named after his Swiss colleague, and a website for patients, doctors and researchers that the article lists calls the condition Wagner syndrome. The source article is a short stub, so it records little of his wider career.