Born on 28 May 1926 in the Belgian Congo where his father Henry Julyan Hoyte MB BS was a medical missionary, he was educated at Sakeji School, Northern Rhodesia, Monckton Combe School, Somerset, King's College, London, and the Westminster Hospital, where his father and uncle had been students and where two of his sisters were nurses. He won the Hanbury prize and the Frederick Bird medal in 1949, and was vice-captain of the Rugby football club 1947-8. After serving as house surgeon at the Westminster and the Royal Northern hospitals, he performed his compulsory military service as a medical officer in the Royal Air Force. He was posted to Southern Rhodesia and made several expeditions into the wild country. On coming back to civil work in London he was house surgeon at Great Ormond Street and then registrar to Sir Clement Price Thomas at Westminster Hospital. After a year as resident surgical officer at Brompton Hospital, he was appointed thoracic surgical registrar at the Rathbone Hospital, Liverpool. Hoyte was a man of abounding energy and spirit, fond of acting and athletic games, travel and mountaineering, but withal religious, musical, and interested in the science as well as the practice of surgery. He had already climbed much in North Wales, the Alps, and Corsica, when he joined an expedition to Kashmir in 1958. He undertook for the Medical Research Council the search for the occurrence of abnormal haemoglobins among the inhabitants of Sind, and reported the first example of the sickle-cell trait found in West Pakistan. He had promised to extend his search among the Hunza race in north Kashmir, but was lost on Mount Minapin on 7 July 1958 aged 32. He was last seen with his leader Edward Warr on an ice-ridge only 300 ft from the summit; mist came down and the two men never reappeared. He was survived by his parents. Publication: Afferent loop strangulation after partial gastrectomy, with W H W Jayne and W K Pallister. *Lancet* 1957, 1, 193.