James Cecil Hogg was born on 25 August 1900 and was educated at Haileybury College where he played rugger for the first XV, and then at Caius College, Cambridge, where in addition to his medical studies he was a member of the Footlights and played tennis for his College. He came to St Bartholomew's Hospital for his clinical course and qualified with the Conjoint Diploma in 1925, graduating at Cambridge the following year. He was house-surgeon to Sir Charles Gordon-Watson and then worked under Douglas Harmer and Sydney Scott in the throat and ear department. His studies for the FRCS were interrupted by a chest infection which necessitated a period of treatment in Switzerland during which he took up ski-ing, in which he became so expert that he was awarded the silver medal of the British Ski Club in 1928. He obtained the FRCS in 1930 and was appointed chief assistant to the throat department at St Bartholomew's, and in 1931 assistant surgeon to the Throat, Nose and Ear Hospital, Golden Square. He also worked at the Brompton Hospital, and the King George Hospital, Ilford, but after 1948 when he was appointed to the staff at St Bartholomew's he concentrated all his work there and at the Royal National Throat, Nose and Ear Hospital in Gray's Inn Road which became the headquarters of the Institute of Otolaryngology in the University of London. Hogg was a good teacher of both undergraduate and postgraduate students, but it was natural that in his specialty he should concentrate on the postgraduate side, and he was Dean of the Institute of Otolaryngology from 1961-1965, which gave him an opportunity to improve education in the specialty. Two other elements in his career were of particular importance; first his interest in the Royal Society of Medicine, in which he became President of the Section of Laryngology and Vice-President of the Section of Otology, and in the British Association of Otolaryngologists, of which he acted for many years as treasurer. And secondly his services to the Royal Family, acknowledged by his appointment as aurist to the Queen in 1961, and the award of the CVO, and rewarded by the honour of the KCVO in 1972. Even after his retirement from hospital work in 1965 he combined a busy practice and maintained his interest in the specialist societies. He also took a kindly and helpful interest in the careers of those who had been his junior colleagues. In 1936 Cecil Hogg married Pollie Victoria Dalby and they had a son and a daughter. When he died suddenly on 5 August 1973 his wife and family survived him.