Ian Young was a consultant orthopaedic surgeon based in Swindon. He was born in Rugby on 25 February 1929, the only child of George Sangster Young, an electrical engineer and Margaret Fenton Wright Breingan. He was educated at Rugby School and Merton College, Oxford. He then went on to University College Hospital, London for his clinical studies, qualifying in 1954. After house jobs at UCH he served in the RAMC with the 1/6th Gurkha Rifles in Malaya and Hong Kong. He returned to continue his surgical training at UCH as a registrar from 1960 to 1962, and then to the Radcliffe Infirmary, where he specialised in orthopaedics and became senior registrar there and at the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre. He was appointed consultant orthopaedic surgeon at Swindon in 1967. He married Anne Martine Davies, another UCH medical graduate, in 1955. They had one son and one daughter. His hobbies included squash and bird-watching. He died on 30 August 2005 of a pulmonary embolism.