Joseph Pett Turney was a consultant surgeon at West Cumberland Hospital, Whitehaven, Cumbria. He was born in Hammersmith, London on 6 June 1918. His parents, Wilfrid Turney and Edith May Turney née Skinner, were both teachers. He had a brother, Wilfrid. Turney attended St Stephen’s Elementary School and Latymer Upper School in Hammersmith and then, from 1935, studied medicine at University College London. He qualified in 1941 with a distinction in surgery and the Fellowes silver medal in clinical medicine. He held house surgeon posts at University College Hospital, King George Hospital, Ilford, and Redhill General Hospital in Edgware, and was conscripted in September 1942 into the Royal Army Medical Corps. He left extensive notes on his wartime experiences at the Royal College of Surgeons. In February 1943, he was sent to North Africa as a general medical officer with the 98th general hospital, but soon grew tired of staffing 96 beds filled with patients with dysentery and malaria. He applied for a forward posting, which the Army ‘…agreed with uncharacteristic alacrity’ and in July 1943 joined the 3rd field ambulance of the first infantry division. In December 1943, the division moved to Italy and on 22 January 1944 Turney landed on Anzio beachhead, Italy, as a resident medical officer in the 1st battalion of the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry at the beginning of the Battle of Anzio. In May, he was wounded and was evacuated to Naples, but in August 1944 rejoined the 3rd field ambulance and fought across the Arno river and through the Apennine mountains ‘until snow stopped play’. In December 1944, the first division was sent to Palestine on police duty, the only time Turney says he carried a side arm. He was promoted from captain to major as second in command of 132 field ambulance and later commanded 18 field hygiene section in Syria. In January 1946, he had home leave from Egypt and in February of that year he was appointed as a senior medical officer on board the troopship *Duchess of Richmond*, sailing to Bombay and back. He was mentioned in despatches for organising a line of evacuation through German positions when his brigade was cut off and in May 1946 was demobilised with the rank of major. He recounts that, a week later, back in England, he was told by a ward sister: ‘I don’t do ward rounds with house surgeons.’ He was a house surgeon at the North Middlesex Hospital, where he worked for Ivor Lewis, then a registrar in orthopaedics at the Postgraduate Medical School of London. From September 1947 to 1952, he was a senior registrar at West Hertfordshire Hospital, Hemel Hempstead. He was subsequently a senior registrar at Redhill General Hospital, Surrey, under Norman Pitt and then held posts at North Shields General Hospital and West Cumberland Hospital, Whitehaven. In 1963, he was appointed as a consultant general surgeon at West Cumberland Hospital. Here he introduced vascular surgery to the hospital ‘…prior to this most of our ruptured aortas died in the ambulance on the 100-mile trip to Newcastle. I taught myself this operation on cadavers and have never seen the operation done by another.’ In notes he left at the RCS, he described his immense frustration with trying to find a consultant position: ‘The first half of my surgical career after leaving the Army was unsatisfactory. I was 45 before I obtained a permanent job…I spent 15 years in temporary and above all terminable posts after getting my FRCS in 1948.’ He attributed these difficulties to an imbalance in the ratio between senior registrar and consultant roles, the ‘adverse effects of patronage’ and a poor decision on his part to leave the Postgraduate Medical School. But his struggle had its advantages: ‘My peripatetic career had its good side in that I met so many excellent surgeons quietly working away in their D G Hospitals largely unrecognised and possibly undervalued.’ Once he became a consultant however, he ‘thoroughly enjoyed’ his work. He was chair of the medical committee, a member of the hospital management committee and a tutor in clinical surgery at the University of Newcastle, but ‘played no part in advancing the science of surgery’. He was ‘content in my routine job’. Outside medicine he was a sidesman of St Laurence’s Church in Ludlow, and a member of the Civic Society and Probus Club. He enjoyed climbing, gardening, languages, woodwork, architecture and travel. In retirement, he read books on history and genetics. In December 1946, he married Cecily Gertrude Blackwell, a legal secretary. They had two children – Gillian Madelaine, a businesswoman, and Theresa Mary, a general practitioner. Joseph Pett Turney died on 26 October 2015 in Edinburgh. He was 97.