Gordon Norrie

Gordon Norrie was a Danish surgeon and ophthalmologist of Scottish parentage, born in Helsingør on 6 May 1855 and dead in Copenhagen on 11 October 1941. He studied medicine at the University of Copenhagen and was first trained as a surgeon, but his interest later turned to ophthalmology, where he specialized in the treatment of the blind. From 1903 to 1938 he worked as an ophthalmologist at the clinic of the Royal Danish Institute for the Blind, which later became the National Eye Clinic. He is associated with the eponymous Norrie disease, a rare form of hereditary blindness that he described in 1927 and called atrophia oculi congenita, a disorder marked by severe retinal malformations, cataracts, leukocoria and atrophy of the iris. The Gordon Norrie Centre for Genetic Eye Diseases at the National Eye Clinic in Hellerup was named in his honour. His wife, Charlotte Norrie, was a pioneer of modern nursing.