John Wickham was a renowned urologist who pioneered keyhole surgery. He was born on 10 December 1927, the son of Alfred James Wickham, a company director of a business at Littlehampton on the south coast, and Hilda May Wickham née Cummins. John’s father died when he was just six years old and from an early age he had to shoulder more responsibilities than his contemporaries. He had clear memories of the Second World War. His descriptions of aerial dogfights were particularly vivid. He used to play with parts of Spitfires and Heinkel aircraft that had been shot down, and with the casings of incendiary bombs. He worked hard at Chichester Grammar School and chose to study botany, zoology, physics and chemistry – unknowingly steering towards medicine as a career. After his interview at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, he walked under the Henry VII Gate and had a premonition that he would be spending a large proportion of his life at Barts. He was accepted to begin his studies in 1946, but the start of his medical training was delayed because he was required to do National Service, initially for two years, but this was extended by a further six months when the Berlin Airlift crisis occurred. He later reflected that although there were aspects of his time as a National Service man that were tedious the experience meant he was better able to take on life as a medical student. During his subsequent career, he also found it was a benefit to have met people from many different backgrounds. As a medical student, he commuted from the south coast, as it was more economical to do so, and he and his mother were on a tight budget. He took an extra year to gain a BSc in physiology and qualified in 1955. His first house job was in neurosurgery with John O’Connell at Hill End, the hospital to which Barts had been evacuated in the Second World War. He found ‘J O’C’, as he was known, to be an inspirational mentor. His second house job was at Barts; nine months with Sir Ronald Bodley Scott and three months attached to the surgical firm of Rupert Corbett and Alec Badenoch. After house jobs, he became an anatomy demonstrator at Barts and resumed commuting from Littlehampton. He held a junior registrar post at Barts in 1958, at the end of which he passed his FRCS in 1959. He was appointed as a registrar at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School, Hammersmith Hospital, where his mentors included Ralph Shackman and Ian Aird. It was there that he met Ann and they married in 1961. He returned to Barts as a senior registrar, working for Alec Badenoch and Ian Todd. In 1962, he was given a Fulbright scholarship and took up a research post at the University of Kentucky in the USA with Ben Eiseman. This enabled him to do the research work that he was later able to submit for his master of surgery degree, granted in 1966. He investigated how to preserve renal function during periods of ischaemia by cooling the kidney to 2°C. To achieve this he developed the prototype of a cooling machine that was subsequently commercialised. The results of his work were to have a major influence on conservative renal surgery and renal transplantation. His talents were recognised and he was offered a permanent post in the USA, but he and Ann decided to return to the UK. After a time as a senior registrar at Barts, he was appointed as a resident surgical officer at St Paul’s Hospital, London. In 1968, at the age of 39, 18 years after he qualified in medicine and after 12 years of postgraduate study in surgery, he was appointed as the first consultant urological surgeon at St Bartholomew’s Hospital. His initial task there was to gain acceptance from his consultant surgical colleagues and recognition that urology was a surgical specialty best undertaken by urologists and not general surgeons with an interest in urology. He had to threaten to resign in order to be allocated beds. He set about developing a department of urology, for five years with Clive Charlton as his first consultant colleague. Bill Hendry joined him in 1973 and then Hugh Whitfield in 1979. He was always keen that there should be no overt seniority and he encouraged his colleagues and junior staff to pursue their own ideas. He never hesitated to delegate and rotated responsibility for the activities of the department. As head of the department of urology at Barts between 1968 and 1985 he advocated that in a teaching hospital consultants should divide their time equally between teaching, research and clinical work. He led by example. He introduced monthly unit meetings that were held on a Friday evening at the home of one of the consultants or the senior registrar and to which all the members of the firm and their partners were invited. These were occasions that many of the house surgeons and registrars who passed through the department remember with mixed emotions. The stress of focusing on research issues after supper, at which everyone but John would have had a modest amount of alcohol, could be a severe test of stamina. John was a mentor to many. He influenced and encouraged the junior staff who came into his department; they found his enthusiasm and constant searching for ways to improve patient care an inspiration. He frequently hosted eminent senior urologists and urologists in training from all over the world. He treated them all with consideration and courtesy and was always keen to share with them his experience and expertise and to listen. John had many innovative ideas. Much of his early research has been overshadowed by his later achievements. He has seldom been given credit for embarking on a computerised system for the collection of clinical data, to enable accurate audit to be undertaken. He published a paper on ‘The urethral pressure profile’ that was the most quoted article in the urological literature *Br J Urol.* 1969 Apr;41[2]:211-7. He developed and advocated a surgical approach to the kidney, the lumbotomy incision, that had originally been described for adrenal surgery. This was of great benefit to patients, since there was much less tissue trauma and post-operative morbidity was greatly reduced. The technique was not easy, but with his considerable surgical prowess he was able to undertake almost all renal surgery with this approach. His determination and vision was to look for and to adopt ways of minimising the trauma of surgery that patients had to endure. He was one of the pioneers of conservative renal surgery. He was able to apply his findings from his research into the preservation of renal function during ischaemia by kidney cooling into his clinical practice. This made it possible to undertake intricate intrarenal conservative surgery for stones, tumours and reconstructive procedures. He later showed that, as an alternative to cooling, renal function could be preserved with inosine given intra-arterially or intravenously. With the introduction of renal transplantation, he was responsible with nephrological colleagues for establishing at Barts a renal retrieval and transplantation service. His philosophy was that the morbidity of the surgery should be less than the morbidity from the underlying pathology. He was the first urological surgeon in the UK to undertake percutaneous renal surgery, with the interventional uro-radiologist, Michael Kellett, with whom he created a pioneering and formidable team. At much the same time, in the middle of the 1980s, non-invasive extracorporeal shockwave lithotripsy was developed in Germany for the treatment of renal stones. Having been thwarted in his approach to the NHS for funds to have for a lithotripter at Barts, he procured money for the first private lithotripter in the UK, on which NHS patients were also treated. He taught, operated and lectured nationally and internationally. He was the author of more than 150 publications in peer-reviewed journals and editor of the *Journal of Minimally Invasive Therapy*. He wrote several textbooks and an autobiography *An open and shut case: the story of keyhole or minimally invasive surgery* (World Scientific Publishing Company, 2017). He started two societies, the European Intrarenal Society and the Society for Minimally Invasive Surgery. He was amongst the first to recognise how vital it was to co-operate with other surgical specialties and with industry to develop new techniques. John’s contributions to medicine were recognised by many. He was awarded the St Peter’s medal from the British Association of Urological Surgeons in 1985. He received the Cecil Joll prize from the Royal College of Surgeons in 1993 for his contributions to minimally invasive treatment of renal disease. In 1998, he was awarded the Galen medal from the Society of Apothecaries. He was the recipient of the Cheselden medal, also from the Royal College of Surgeons, in 2013. He was an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and of the Royal College of Radiologists. He received the Rovsing medal from the Danish Surgical Society after giving a lecture on minimally invasive surgery. He was awarded an honorary degree of doctor of medicine in the University of Gothenburg in 1994. Much of his leisure time was devoted to cars. He built a Lotus from a kit. He gathered a garage full of old cars, all of which he drove rather than treating them as museum pieces. He was also an immensely generous host to his junior staff and to colleagues. The themed parties that he had at his splendid home were legendary. He was supported throughout his career by his wife Ann. Their three daughters (Susan, Caroline and Clare) and seven grandchildren were a source of great joy to them both. John Wickham died on 26 October 2017 aged 89. He will be remembered both nationally and internationally as a pioneer in advancing minimally invasive surgery, not only in urology but also in other branches of surgery.