Born on 22 October 1873 at the Manor House, Poplar, the fifth son and ninth of the ten children of Francis Mead Corner, MRCS, JP, a general practitioner, who had married his cousin Anne Corner. The family derived from Lythe, near Whitby, Yorkshire. He was educated at Epsom College, where he was head prefect, captain of the XV and a member of the cricket XI, and throughout life took a keen interest in his old school. He was honorary secretary of the Old Epsomian Club 1907-20 and subsequently its president, and was a generous subscriber to the centenary fund which he inaugurated. He was a scholar and prizeman of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and took first-class honours in the natural sciences tripos part 1 in 1894. In the same year he took the London BSc. At St Thomas's Hospital, where he received his clinical training, he won further scholarships. At the Cambridge MB BS examination 1898 he was placed first in every subject, a distinction probably unique. He took the Conjoint qualification this year, and proceeded to the Fellowship at the end of 1899; the Cambridge master of surgery degree, then considered the blue riband of achievement, he took in 1906. Corner's intellectual ability was matched by his exceedingly tall, robust, and commanding personality. He served as house surgeon at St Thomas's and at Leeds General Infirmary, and was elected assistant surgeon to St Thomas's in 1900. He was extremely popular as a demonstrator and lecturer. Corner built up a large private practice at 37 Harley Street, and served on the honorary staff of the Hospital for Sick Children, Great Ormond Street, and at the Purley and Wood Green Hospitals. He was also surgeon to Epsom College. During the war of 1914-18 he was commissioned in the RAMC and promoted major. He was consulting surgeon to Queen Mary's auxiliary hospital at Roehampton, and organized an amputation clinic at St Thomas's. Corner was interested in nearly every aspect of surgery, but more particularly in orthopaedics and abdominal surgery. At the College he delivered the Erasmus Wilson lectures in 1904 on "Acute infective gangrenous processes (necroses) in the alimentary tract", and the Arris and Gale lectures in 1919 on "The nature of scar tissue and painful operation stumps". He was a vice-president of the Medical Society of London and of the Harveian Society, to which he delivered a Harveian lecture. In the British Medical Association he was secretary of the section for the diseases of children at the 1907 annual meeting, and vice-president of the section of orthopaedics in 1912. He sat on the board of advanced studies in London University, and was a visitor for King Edward's Hospital Fund. In his younger days Corner was an experienced mountaineer; he was also a learned mycologist, and an appreciative student of architecture. He married in 1903 Henrietta, daughter of James Henderson of the Gows, Ivergowrie, Dundee. Corner was reaching the peak of a most distinguished surgical career in the years immediately following the first world war, when he was struck down in his late forties by a familial degenerative nervous disease, whose progressive severity he bore with stoical resignation for nearly thirty years, dying at the age of seventy-six after long endurance of total blindness and severe lameness. On abandoning his consulting practice in London in 1921 he was for a time superintendent of a convalescent home at Great Missenden. He died at his own home Stratton End, Beaconsfield on 2 May 1950, survived by his wife, their son, who was a lecturer in botany at Cambridge, and their two daughters. Publications:- *Clinical and pathological observations on acute abdominal diseases*. London, 1904. *The surgery of the diseases of the appendix*, with W H Battle. London, 1904. *The operations of general practice*, with I H Pinches. London, 1907; 2nd edition 1908; 3rd edition 1910. *Diseases of the male generative organs*. London, 1907. *Male diseases in general practice*. London, 1910.