Edward Phillimore Brockman was born at Liverpool in 1895 and educated at Liverpool College and at Cambridge. His university career was interrupted by the first world war, when he served in the Royal Navy before returning to St Thomas's Hospital. He qualified in 1919 and proceeded in due course to the FRCS and the MCh Degree. Brockman held almost every junior post that existed at St Thomas's, so that his basic training was very broad. Orthopaedic surgery claimed him, undoubtedly owing to the influence of Rowley Bristow, to whom he was chief assistant for several years. He was awarded the Robert Jones Medal by the British Orthopaedic Association in 1928 for his essay on congenital club foot, a classic work and still referred to today. In 1929 he was appointed the first orthopaedic surgeon to Westminster Hospital. He was also on the consultant staff of the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital, St Vincent's Orthopaedic Hospital at Pinner, and King Edward VII's Sanatorium at Midhurst. A leading figure in the expanding field of orthopaedics, he was for many years honorary secretary of the British Orthopaedic Association. Edward Brockman, known to his colleagues as Sam, was a master surgeon. Highly competent in the art and craft of his speciality, he had the ability to see the simple solution to a problem. He abhorred unnecessary elaborate procedures, as he did pomposity of any kind. His clinical judgement was always sound, usually owing to a combination of wide experience and clear reasoning, and occasionally, it seemed, to inspired intuition. He was an oustanding clinical teacher, and many generations of students still recall his dynamic outpatient clinics and teaching ward rounds. These stimulating occasions were, however, sometimes tempered by apprehension lest a failure to elicit some obvious physical sign or offer a reasonable diagnosis might lead to firm though always kindly castigation. Those who worked closely with him found a never-ending store of kindness, wisdom, and common sense. Sam Brockman was not only an excellent orthopaedic surgeon but he was also an excellent diagnostician and something of a rheumatologist at a time when such specialists were almost unknown in Britain. He was an extremely careful surgeon and would himself only perform an orthopaedic operation when he was reasonably certain of a good result, otherwise he would advise a conservative non-surgical line of treatment. He had a keen nose for rheumatic disorders such as gout and periarthritis of a shoulder and referred many such patients to the rheumatism unit at Westminster Hospital. His main contributions to medicine and surgery lay in routine diagnosis and treatment in ward and clinic, but his observation in the *British journal of surgery* in 1927, that the anatomic lesions in renal osteodystrophy differed fundamentally from those in rickets, is recorded in Snapper's *Medical clinics on bone diseases* of 1949 as having changed current ideas on the subject at that time. He was a very sane, fair, and balanced surgeon-physician and truly delightful colleague. Throughout his life he maintained his standards, of which honesty in all things predominated. Though he was understanding of the foibles of others, he saw things essentially in black and white, and there were few grey tones in his make-up. He was for many years treasurer of the Students' Union, when he taught them many things unconnected with medicine, not least the value and the use of money. He brought to the hospital medical committee when he was chairman a simple honest approach to every problem coupled with a clarity and brevity that have never been surpassed. Brockman, and his wife Barbara had two sons and two daughters. He died on 27 January 1977, aged 82.