At the edge of Bantry town, by the harbour, is a beautiful walk called Béicín loop. The way markers for this heritage walk are dedicated to the memory of Seán Baker, who was chairman of Bantry Town Commissioners and, for many years, the sole county surgeon at Bantry Hospital. Seán truly practised general surgery; a typical list would range from thyroidectomy, to gastrectomy, to pining a fractured neck of femur, to prostatectomy. Lots of west Cork tonsils and adenoids were also removed, and trauma was grist to his mill. Being of a generation of surgeons who were well trained and knew what to do, he just got on with it, and rarely referred patients to Cork, which was a 56-mile journey by bad roads. In the words of one of his contemporaries, he was last of the 'county surgeon king emperors'. Seán Christopher Baker was born in Ennis, County Clare, Ireland, in 1923. He was the second son of Michael J Baker and Bridget Baker (née O'Dwyer). His secondary schooling was at St Flannan's College, Ennis, where the dominant recollection of students from the depressed 1930s was of being half-starved. In 1943, during what was called the 'Emergency' in Ireland, and the Second World War everywhere else, he entered University College Dublin at Earlsfort Terrace to study medicine. He was an excellent student and declared an early interest in surgery by winning both the university's and the Mater Misericordiae Hospital's gold medals in surgery in 1949. In June 1953 he took the fellowship examination of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, and spent the evening before going around the Dublin hospitals with some of his co-examinees, looking for likely cases. It was a fool's errand, as none of the cases they saw turned up in the exam. However, he was successful and celebrated in the usual manner at 'the Swan' in York Street, at the back of the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin. He later added the English FRCS to his credentials. From 1951 to 1953, Seán Baker was a registrar at the Mater Hospital, Dublin, before following the path, well-trodden by Irish doctors, to Britain, where he became a consultant surgeon to the Archway group of hospitals from 1955 to 1957. Along the way he met and married an anaesthetic colleague, Marie Courtney, in 1954. However, home beckoned, and in 1957 he returned to Ireland as county surgeon at Monaghan County Hospital. In the late 1950s the county was still the administrative unit for health in Ireland and each had a county hospital for acute care and a county home for the long term care of the elderly and disabled. County surgeons worked on their own and in many hospitals the permanent medcial staff comprised one surgeon and one physician, the latter being responsibe for obstetrics. Disconcertingly, sometimes the county hospital existed across two sites, for example, in County Wexford, with the medical hospital in one town and the surgical hospital miles away in another. In 1959 Seán Baker moved south to Bantry, where he would spend the rest of his life looking after the patients of west Cork and contributing significantly to the local community and to the medical profession in Ireland. While working in Bantry, Sean Baker published a number of reports in the *Journal of the Irish Medical Association* of interesting cases he had treated there, including 'Spontaneous epigastric haemorrhage' (*J Ir Med Assoc*. 1959 Jun;44[264]:178-9) and 'Spontaneous rupture of the urinary bladder' (*J Ir Med Assoc*. 1964 Mar;54:96-7). In the 1970s an attempt was made to regionalise the Irish hospital system, which would have reduced the number of county hospitals considerably. Seán Baker was to the fore in ensuring that Bantry Hospital would not be a casualty of that process. He became chairman of the Southern Health Board, with responsibility for administering health services in Cork and Kerry, and in 1977 he was appointed to the centralised consultants' appointment board, Comhairle na nOspidéal. Nationally, he was active in the Irish Medical Union (IMU), a representative trade union for Irish doctors founded in 1962. He later became president of the IMU and a trustee of the Irish Hospital Consultants Association when it was established in 1987. He was a strong advocate of an independent medical profession and was involved in politics, medical and local, all his life. In Bantry he was instrumental in enhancing the town square and erecting a statue to his hero, Theobald Wolfe Tone, a leader of the eighteenth century United Irishmen. Tall with white hair, he had a commanding presence and bounding energy. He had two children, Letty and Mary, was a keen golfer and an excellent fly fisherman. He was greatly loved in Bantry and esteemed for the work he did there.