John Wanless Dickson was a consultant orthopaedic surgeon to the Ispwich and East Suffolk Hospital. Born on 31 July 1920, in Westgate-on-Sea, he was the fourth generation of his family to enter medicine. His great-grandfather was John Wanless MD of Dundee and Montreal. His father, Ivan Wanless, was an MD Toronto and a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh. John's mother was Helen née London. He received his early education at the University of Toronto schools, before returning to England to enter the Middlesex Hospital to study medicine. There he gained the University of London scholarship in anatomy and physiology, as well as class prizes in anatomy, public health and surgery. After house appointments at the Middlesex and the Royal Northern Hospitals, he returned to demonstrate anatomy at the Middlesex, before specialising in orthopaedics. He was orthopaedic registrar at the Royal Northern Hospital and Sheffield Royal Infirmary under Sir Frank Holdsworth and returned to the Middlesex as senior registrar under P H Newman. He was appointed consultant orthopaedic surgeon to the Ipswich and East Suffolk Hospital, where his professional interests were in metastatic paraplegia and paediatric orthopaedics. Private practice never interested him: after a brief trial he bought a toy tin calf from Woolworth's, painted it gold, and set it on the mantelpiece as an idol that was not to be worshipped. There it sat for the next 20 years. In 1949 he married Evangeline Mary Lambart Sladen, great granddaughter of William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, and of the eighth Earl of Cavan. Her brother was Professor WJ L Sladen of the department of pathobiology at Johns Hopkins, Baltimore. They had two daughters, Margaret and Elizabeth, and one son, Andrew Frederick Lambart Wanless Dickson, who became a general practitioner in Gloucestershire. On his retirement in 1980 Dickson took up his interest in local history, especially that of the plague and land usage in mediaeval Suffolk. He left his papers to the Wellcome Institute. He died from pneumococcal septicaemia on 16 June 2001.