Brendan Hickey was a consultant general surgeon and urologist at Morrison Hospital, Swansea, and spent some time as a professor of surgery in Khartoum and as a surgical specialist to the Iraq government. He was born on 20 June 1912 in Newton Hyde, Cheshire, where his father, John Edward Hickey, was a schoolmaster. His mother was Grace Neil née Dykes. He was educated at Manchester Grammar School, from which he won an open scholarship to University College, Oxford, where he won the Theodore Williams scholarship in pathology. At the London Hospital he won the Treeves and Lethby prizes. After qualifying he did house appointments at the London under Sir James Walton and Douglas Northfield, and had passed the FRCS before the war broke out. He joined the RAMC, rising to be lieutenant colonel, and after the war continued as a keen member of the Territorial Army, becoming colonel in charge of Third Western General Hospital and honorary surgeon to the Queen. He was Hunterian Professor in 1958. He married in 1939 Marjorie Flynn, by whom he had one son, who became a doctor, and two daughters. Brendan Hickey died on 3 August 2006.