Born in Montreal on 6 August 1858, the second child and elder son of Frederick Lawford, architect, and Anne Shaw Low, his wife. He was educated at a private school before entering McGill University, where he graduated MD in 1879. He came to London immediately and entered the medical school at St Thomas's Hospital. Having determined from an early period to devote himself to ophthalmology he became clinical assistant to Edward Nettleship, and after acting as assistant house physician at St Thomas's Hospital and resident clinical assistant at Bethlem Royal Hospital he was appointed house surgeon at the Royal London Ophthalmic Hospital, Moorfields, in 1883. He became pathologist and curator of the hospital museum in 1884, assistant surgeon in 1892, surgeon in 1895, and consulting surgeon in 1918. At St Thomas's Hospital he was elected assistant ophthalmic surgeon in 1886, and was surgeon and lecturer on ophthalmic surgery from 1891 until 1915, when he resigned and was made consulting ophthalmic surgeon. At the time of his death he was ophthalmic surgeon to the Medical Appeal Board of the Royal Navy and a member of the Committee for the Prevention of Blindness. He was secretary of the Ophthalmological Society of the United Kingdom 1895-97, and president 1911-13. He was editor of the *Ophthalmic Review* from 1910 to 1916, and was chairman of the editorial committee and afterwards the managing director of the *British Journal of Ophthalmology* from 1917 to 1926. He was also president of the Council of British Ophthalmologists, and during his tenure of the office he arranged with the Ministry of Health for the institutional treatment of children suffering from diseases of the eye. Lawford was a highly accomplished operator who used either hand with equal facility. He was endowed with an exceptional sense of duty and carried out the work of every office he filled with punctilious care. He never married, but lived after his retirement with his mother and two sisters at Ashtead, Surrey, where he died on 3 January 1934. He left one-half of the ultimate residue of his fortune to St Thomas's Hospital and the other half to McGill University Montreal. Publications: Eye symptoms in insanity in Tuke's *Dictionary of Psychological Medicine*, 1892 1, 485. Pupil reactions. *Ibid*. 1892, 2, 1052. Diseases of the orbit. *Encyclopaedia Medica*, 1901, 8, 549, unsigned. Ocular lesions in disorders of secretory and excretory organs, Norris and Oliver *System of diseases of the eye*, 1900, 4, 645.