Charles Ian Murphie was born on 23 September 1911 in Birkenhead where his father was a partner in a family business. He was educated at Birkenhead School and Cheltenham College where he was a scholar. He then went to Wadham College, Oxford and came up to King's College Hospital for his clinical work, qualifying in 1937. At Wadham he was Bayliss exhibitioner, and at King's he held the Burney Yeo Scholarship, as well as distinguishing himself in athletics, particularly as a long-distance runner, and won the Victor Ludorum Cup in 1936. During the second world war he served in the RAMC, chiefly in the Mediterranean theatre, and was a prisoner of war for a short period. After demobilization he took the FRCS in 1948, and was surgical registrar at King's College Hospital, Hammersmith Hospital, the Metropolitan Hospital, and the Royal London Homoeopathic Hospital, and finally he became senior registrar at St Paul's Hospital after which urology became the dominant interest in his clinical practice, and he wrote on renal tuberculosis. He was senior research assistant at the Institute of Urology from 1950 till 1956 when he was appointed consultant to the German Hospital, and in 1961 to the East Ham Memorial Hospital where he established a special genitourinary department. Murphie preserved his interest in athletics and was one of the medical advisers to the Amateur Athletic Association. As a boy he was a good singer and in later life an active member of the Madrigal Society. He was very fond of clocks and of demonstrating their mechanism to his friends. Much of his spare time was devoted to committee work, and at the time of his early death he was chairman of his hospital management committee. In 1969 he became aware of failing health, but he did not allow this to interfere with devotion to his work, yet his death from a heart attack on 19 June 1971 at the age of 59 was not unexpected. He was twice married, and survived by two daughters of his first marriage, his wife and an infant daughter.