Frank Zadik was born of Jewish parentage on 29 August 1914, in the German town of Altona, near Hamburg, the son of Manfred Zadik, a solicitor, and Nelly Bondy. He was educated at the Lichtwarek Schule in Hamburg, and began his medical Studies at the Hamburg and Freiburg medical schools in 1932. Following Hitler's rise to power in Germany he came to England in 1934. After a year in Oxford, he resumed his studies at the University of Sheffield Medical School, where he qualified in 1939. After junior appointments including an orthopaedic registrarship at Sheffield Royal Infirmary, he served as a captain in the RAMC in West Africa, India and Burma from 1942 to 1946. He then resumed his orthopaedic training in Sheffield with Frank Holdsworth and Blacow Yates, and in 1948 he was appointed senior registrar there, and subsequently consultant orthopaedic surgeon to Wigan and Leigh Hospitals, where he worked from 1951 to 1979. The Zadik operation (obliteration of the nail-bed of the great toe for ingrowing toenail) is named after him. He married Elena Mackevicliute, a medical student, in 1941 (she subsequently became a clinical assistant in anaesthetics) and they had four children, the youngest of whom is also a doctor. His interests outside medicine lay especially in music, oil painting and chess. He died on 31 December 1995 of cerebrovascular disease and chronic renal failure, and is survived by his wife and family.