William James Lytle was born on 27 September 1896 at Maghera, Co Londonderry, Northern Ireland. His father, Thomas Alexander Lytle was a farmer, his mother, Mary Jane (née Moore) the daughter of a farmer, and his uncle was a general practitioner. He was educated at Rainey Endowed School, Magherafelt, Campbell College, Belfast, and Queen's University, Belfast. He held house appointments at Liverpool (Children's Hospital), Manchester (Ancoats) and Sheffield, where he was registrar at the Royal Infirmary and honorary surgeon to the Royal Infirmary and the Children's Hospital. He served in the Navy as surgeon probationer (1915-1916) and as surgeon in the RAF (1918-1919). He lectured at the Royal College of Surgeons in 1951 and 1957 on inguinal hernia and femoral hernia respectively. In Sheffield he served as Chairman of the BMA division, Chairman of the Medical Committee of the United Hospitals and President of the Medico-Chirurgical Society, and as postgraduate dean. He married in 1940 Margery Wier, whose father and grandfather were doctors. They had a son John, an anaesthetist, and a daughter Elizabeth who studied medicine and married a lecturer in medicine at Edinburgh. His hobbies were golf, history and architecture, foreign travel and walking. He wrote on inguinal hernia, femoral hernia and the anatomy concerned. He died on 27 June 1986 in his 90th year, survived by his wife and family which by then included two grandchildren studying medicine at Cambridge.