Thomas Lowden was a casualty surgeon in Sunderland. He was born in Leeds on 25 March 1910, where his father, Harold Lowden, was an engineer and his mother, Ethel Annie Lamb, a schoolteacher. From Leeds Grammar School he won a Holroyd scholarship to Keble College, Oxford, and went back to Leeds for his clinical training, qualifying in 1934. After junior posts in Leeds General Infirmary and the Royal Victoria Infirmary, Newcastle upon Tyne (from which he passed the FRCS), he joined the RAMC as a surgical specialist in 1941. He served in India, Iraq, Jordan, Palestine, North Africa and Egypt, before taking part in the Sicily landings and the invasion of Italy, rising to the rank of acting lieutenant colonel. He remained for a time in Germany, before returning to specialise in accident and emergency surgery, becoming consultant in that specialty in Sunderland in 1946 and establishing its casualty department. He published The casualty department (Edinburgh and London, E & S Livingstone, 1956), and developed a subspecialty of hand surgery and was an early member of the Hand Club (later the British Society for Surgeon of the Hand). After he retired in 1970 he continued to do locums at Hexham General Hospital. He married Margaret Purdie, a doctor, in 1945. They had a daughter, Catherine, who became a teacher, and a son, Richard, a lawyer. Among his hobbies were mountain walking, especially in Norway, 16 mm photography and the history of the Crusades. He died on 9 October 2005.