Peter Choyce was a leading ophthalmic surgeon who championed and developed artificial lens implants. He was born on 1 March 1919 in London. His father, Charles Coley Choyce, was professor of surgery at University College Hospital, and a member of Council at the time of his death in 1937. His mother was Gwendolen Alice née Dobbing. David was educated at Stowe, where he won an entrance scholarship. He went on to University College London to read medicine, where he won prizes in biology and physics, and a gold medal for pharmacology. During this time he was much influenced by Max Rosenheim. After junior posts at University College Hospital and Hammersmith, where he was influenced by G Grey Turner, he served in the RNVR from 1943 to 1946, as a medical officer on troop transports, travelling all over the world. On demobilisation he specialised in ophthalmology, training at Moorfields under Sir Harold Ridley and H B Stallard. He became a strong proponent of Ridley's pioneer work on artificial lenses after cataract removal, urged him not to give up in the face of opposition, and founded the Intra-Ocular Implant Club. He was appointed ophthalmic senior registrar at UCH in 1951, but found his way to promotion in London repeatedly blocked, so he became a consultant at Southend General Hospital in 1954, where he found that he had escaped from the ultra-conservative milieu of London. He was invited to be consultant to the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, was President of the British Intra-Ocular Implant Society, and, in 1977, was made an honorary member of the American Implant Society. The Choyce medal lecture was founded in his honour, and he gave the inaugural lecture himself in 1981. He published extensively on intra-ocular implants, and introduced many innovations of his own, which he did not patent. He was also an authority on tropical ophthalmology, notably leprosy and onchocerciasis, and was a consultant at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases. He was a Hunterian Professor in 1961. He was a very keen golfer, playing to a handicap of one, and becoming president of the British Ophthalmologists Golf Society. He disapproved of, but saw as inevitable, the formation of the College of Ophthalmologists. He married in 1949 Diana Graham, by whom he had three sons. The eldest became a general practitioner and the youngest, Matthew, was a Fellow who disappeared without trace in 1997 whilst a senior registrar in accident and emergency medicine in Newcastle - a major family tragedy. Peter retired from the NHS in 1988, but continued to operate until he was 80. He died on 8 August 2001.