Born at Natchez, Mississippi, on 20 June 1863 during the Civil War, the second son of the Rev Ebenezer Dickey Finney, pastor of the Greenwood Presbyterian Church, and Annie Louise Parker, his wife, who died when her child was five months old. The Finneys were of Ulster stock settled in Pennsylvania since 1720, and the Parkers were New Englanders, who had come from Wiltshire to Massachusetts in 1644. On the death of their mother the two small boys were cared for by a Mrs Stephen Turpin, in gratitude to whom J M Finney was given the third Christian name of Turpin. He was educated at the High School and later at the Academy at Bel Air, Massachusetts, and graduated from Princeton on his twenty-first birthday. He took his medical training at Harvard, when J C Warren was professor of surgery, proceeding MD in 1889, after a severe attack of typhoid in his third year. He played football for both Princeton and Harvard. Finney served as a "substitute" at the Boston Lying-in Hospital and then as an "interne" (house surgeon) at the Massachusetts General Hospital, on the west surgical service under C B Porter, John Homans, and A T Cabot; his life-long friend W S Thayer was house physician at the same time. On 7 May 1889, the opening day of the newly founded Johns Hopkins Hospital at Baltimore, he was appointed to the surgical staff by W S Halsted, and served there for the rest of his life. Finney acted at first as Halsted's assistant, and began to acquire a large private practice. Not being allowed, while Halsted lived, to send his own patients to the Johns Hopkins wards, he became attached to the Union Protestant Infirmary at Baltimore, which he greatly developed. It was reorganized in 1919 as the Union Memorial Hospital through his efforts, and its operating rooms were named the "J M T Finney operating suite". The old building was converted, also under his care, into the Provident Hospital for Negroes, in whom he always took a benevolent interest, having been brought up by a negro nurse. Owing to the nearness of Washington he was in later years frequently called in consultation to eminent public men and became familiar with the families of no less than four Presidents: Theodore Roosevelt, to whom he bore a marked personal resemblance, Harding, Wilson, and Coolidge. With Woodrow Wilson he had already been closely associated on the Board of Regents of Princeton, and was offered the presidency of the university on Wilson's retirement in 1912. As early as 1893, when he was thirty, he was offered the chair of surgery in the University of Texas at Galveston, and many years later refused the chair of surgery at Harvard. In 1894 he paid his first visit to Europe, but brought back from Germany a memory of ruthless and inhuman surgery; von Mikulicz, at Breslau, alone struck him more favourably. He found much of interest in the clinics of Bassini at Padua, Kocher at Bern, and Billroth in Vienna, though Billroth himself had died earlier in the year. He formed a much happier impression from later contacts with French and English surgeons. In 1898, at the time of the Spanish-American war, he was commissioned as a major in the Medical Corps of the Maryland State Militia, the National Guard, and became brigadier-general and surgeon-general to the State Governor. In 1913 he was commissioned as a first lieutenant in the Medical Reserve of the United States Army, and was appointed in 1917 director of the Johns Hopkins Unit at Base Hospital 18 in France, with the rank of major. He was promoted colonel and brigadier-general with the post of chief surgical consultant, American Expeditionary Force. In this position he was in close touch with George Makins, Cuthbert Wallace, and Theodore Tuffier, of all of whom he formed the highest opinion. He was decorated DSM, and received French and Belgian orders. In 1922 he was appointed professor of surgery at the Johns Hopkins, a post which he resigned in 1925. Finney took an active part in surgical societies. He was an original member (1903) of the Clinical Surgical Society, the parent of professional travelling clubs, organized by Will Mayo and Harvey Cushing, and later its president; president of the American Surgical Association 1921; and a foundation Fellow and first president (1913-15) of the American College of Surgeons at Chicago. He received many honours at home and abroad. He was made Hon LLD Tulane 1935; Hon LLD Harvard 1937; Hon LLD Loyola College, Baltimore 1940. In 1932 the Surgical Society of Boston awarded him the Bigelow medal for "achievement in surgery"; more than forty years before, as an interne at the General Hospital, he had watched the veteran Henry Jacob Bigelow "perform two of his astounding operations": a reduction of a dislocation of the hip, and his operation for crushing stone in the bladder. Finney was elected an Honorary Fellow of the College on 12 February 1920, and was present on 14 January 1927 when Lord Moynihan brought a party of Leeds students to visit the College. Finney appears in the group photograph taken then on the College steps, seated between Moynihan and D'Arcy Power. He was also an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Colleges of Surgeons in Edinburgh and Ireland, and an Honorary Member of the Hunterian Society and the Medical Society of London. Finney married on 20 April 1892 Mary E Gross of Harrisburg, one of the first class to graduate from the Johns Hopkins Nursing School. Mrs Finney survived him with three sons, a daughter, and fifteen grandchildren. His eldest son and namesake followed him in the surgical profession, as did his second son, Dr George Gross Finney; his third son, Eben D Finney, became an architect, and his daughter, Mary, married James S McDonnell. Finney died at Baltimore on 30 May 1942, aged 78. Finney was an excellent general surgeon, who played an important part in the rapid development of abdominal surgery that took place during his life. His operation of pyloroplasty, made public in 1902, was his most valuable original contribution. A man of great ability and solid worth, he was typical of the best class of American of British puritan stock. He was a sound man of business, in much demand on administrative and educational boards. Finney was a practising Christian and a prominent member of the Presbyterian Church. Although absolutely self-confident, he was very modest, and his fees were always moderate. He operated on more medical men, nurses, students, and religious ministers than any other eminent surgeon, and always without fee. He was a keen follower of football, having played in both the Princeton and Harvard teams, perhaps the only man ever to do so. By the end of his life he was without question the foremost citizen of Maryland. In 1937, in his honour, the Finney-Howell Foundation for Cancer Research Fellowships was founded from the bequest by Dr George Walker of his whole estate for this purpose. At a gathering on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday, 20 June 1938, Finney was presented with a bust of himself carved by Hans Schuler. There is also a portrait in oils by Thomas C Corner, reproduced in *Surgery, Gynecology and Obstetrics*, 1942, 75, facing p 122. Publications:- The pathology and treatment of chronic ulcers. *Maryland med J*. 1890, 24, 485. Two cases of pylorectomy. *Johns Hopk Hosp Bull*. 1898, 9, 294. A new method of pyloroplasty. *Trans Amer Surg Assoc*. 1902, 20, 165, and *Johns Hopk Hosp Bull*. 1902, 13, 155. Three years' experience with pyloroplasty. *Surg Gynec Obstet*. 1906, 2, 163. Surgery of the breast, in Keen's *Surgery*, 1908, 3, 563-613. *The significance and effect of pain*. Boston, 1914. *The physician*. New York, 1923. *A surgeon's life, autobiography of J M T Finney*. New York, 1940.