John Neville Ormrod was a consultant ophthalmic surgeon in Kent. He was born in Birmingham on 12 December 1922 to James Ormrod, a dental surgeon, and Dorothy Ormrod née Wilson. His early schooling was in Birmingham at Chigwell House and Lickey Hills preparatory schools, and then at Aldenham School, before he attended Birmingham University Medical School. As a student he gained prizes in medicine, pathology, ophthalmology, forensic medicine and toxicology, qualifying in 1944. He stayed in Birmingham at Queen Elizabeth Hospital as a house officer in neurology, neurosurgery and ophthalmology. He was then a registrar in neurosurgery. During these postgraduate appointments he contracted pulmonary tuberculosis and later spinal tuberculosis, and was a patient for five years. On recovery from this long illness, he devoted himself to ophthalmology, working in Maidstone, Birmingham and Moorfields Eye Hospital. He was appointed as a consultant ophthalmic surgeon to the Kent County Ophthalmic Hospital in Maidstone and Gravesend, and North Kent Hospital in 1956. He developed special interests and expertise in lamellar keratoplasty and dysthyroid eye disease, and made many contributions to the *British Medical Journal*, *British Journal of Ophthalmology* and to the *Transactions of the Ophthalmological Society of the United Kingdom*. He retired from the NHS in 1983. In his retirement he used his expertise in Kenya, doing mainly cataract surgery 'up-country' for Sight by Wings, his transport being by light monoplane. He married Kay Stone in 1956 and they had one son (James) and one daughter (Elizabeth). His wife was a nurse and acted as his scrub nurse when he worked in Kenya. He died peacefully at his home in Sutton Valence, Kent, aged 86 on 16 October 2009.