Brian Courtice was a senior consultant surgeon at the Royal Brisbane Hospital. Born in Mitchell, Queensland on 13 July 1920, he was the son of Charles Richard Henry Courtice, a textile merchant, and his wife Agnes Louise née Hooper, who was a tailoress. After primary education in Mitchell he attended Nudge College in Brisbane from 1930 to 1936 before enrolling at the University of Queensland Medical School in 1937. Winning the W N Robertson Medal and coming first in the final examination in 1943, he was one of only the fourth batch of students to be able to complete the medical course in Queensland. After qualifying he did house jobs at the Brisbane General Hospital and in the three years that he spent there from 1943 to 1946 he did, he later remarked, a *good deal of emergency surgery*. He came to the UK and worked as a house surgeon in Leicester at the City General Hospital. Passing the fellowship of the college in 1948, he was a locum surgeon at Mile End Hospital and St Olave’s in Rotherhithe, before moving to the Royal Hospital in Wolverhampton for a year from 1949 to 1950. He was later to describe the four years that he spent in the UK as the happiest and most fruitful of his life and he remained a strong anglophile. On his return to Australia in 1950 he was appointed visiting assistant surgeon at the Royal Brisbane Hospital (RBH), taking up the position in 1951. Thirteen years later, in 1964, he was promoted to senior surgeon and he also worked as visiting surgeon to Wolston Park Mental Hospital from 1967 onwards. Appointed a lecturer to years four and six medical students he found the undergraduates uncongenial, complaining that they merely wanted information they could repeat in their exams; he found the postgraduates far more rewarding. He was formally retired from the staff of the RBH in 1980 under an ‘existing age’ rule, but continued to lecture and examine students. Until he was 80 he continued to assist at cardio-thoracic operations, for the last 12 years of this practice participating in five or six a week. He wrote that with the small population in his area it was not possible to get a huge experience in any disease or operation with the exception of neoplasms of the skin. In 1967 and again in 1971 he was a member of an Australian surgical team, sponsored by the Commonwealth Civil Aid Programme, which went to Bien Hoa Province, South Vietnam to assist with the surgical problems of Vietnamese civilians and to give lectures at the Cho Re Hospital and the medical school in Saigon. A member of a social security appeals tribunal for many years, he was also on the medical board (surgical) for workers’ compensation from 1967 to 1990, helping to assess claims for work related disabilities. Outside medicine he enjoyed tennis, golf, beach fishing and photography. In retirement he enjoyed veterans tennis tournaments and became Australian singles champion in the over 75 and in the over 80 age ranges, attributing his success to his continued mobility as opposed to more skilful players who were, he said, only able to hobble about the court. He was a member of Tattersall’s Club and the Indooroopilly Golf Club in Brisbane. He married Judith Margaret née Gardiner, a nurse, in 1955. They had three children; Richard, a teacher; Angela, a housewife; and Andrew, who became a solicitor. He died at home on 21 March 1917 aged 96 and was survived by his wife, children and grandchildren.