John Fitzpatrick, professor and chairman of the department of surgery, Mater Misericordiae Hospital and University College, Dublin (UCD), was an internationally-renowned urologist. The son of a prominent lawyer, he was born in Dublin on 15 July 1948. He was educated at Gonzaga College and won a place at Oxford University to study greats, but chose to study medicine at UCD instead. He qualified in 1971. Over the next few years he held junior posts at St Vincent's and Sir Patrick Dun's hospitals in Dublin. In 1977, he went to the UK for further training in urology. He was a registrar and then a senior registrar at St Peter's Hospital and the Institute of Urology, London. In March 1981, he returned to Dublin as a consultant urologist at Meath and St James' hospitals and as a senior lecturer at Trinity College. Five years later, he became a professor and chairman of the department of surgery at the Mater Misericordiae Hospital and University College, Dublin, and a consultant urologist at Mater Misericordiae Hospital. In 2012, following his retirement, he became head of research at the Irish Cancer Society. His research interests included renal ischaemia, ureteric obstruction, benign prostatic hyperplasia, prostatic carcinoma, minimally invasive surgery, reconstructive urology, infertility and erectile dysfunction. With Bill Watson he established a major research programme in prostate cancer and was a founding member of the Prostate Cancer Research Consortium. He was one of earliest advocates for the use of prostate specific antigen (PSA) as a means of early detection of the disease. He was among the first in Britain and Ireland to embrace total surgical removal of the prostate when the cancer was still confined to the gland. He was a visiting professor at 45 leading academic centres worldwide. He wrote more than 280 peer-reviewed journal articles, over 100 book chapters and edited 18 textbooks. He was editor in chief of *BJU International* and was on the editorial board of 25 other academic journals. He was president of the British Association of Urological Surgeons and of the Irish Society of Urology. He was a member of the board of trustees of the Urology Foundation and chairman of their scientific committee. In 2004 he was awarded the St Peter's medal of the British Association of Urological Surgeons. He became a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland in 1975. He was a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow, and of the College of Urologists of South Africa. He was an honorary member of the British Association of Urological Surgeons and of the American Urological Association, as well as an honorary member of the urological societies of Australia and New Zealand, South Africa, Germany, Netherlands, India, Hungary, Argentina, Greece and Georgia. John Michael Fitzpatrick died on 14 May 2014 from a massive subarachnoid haemorrhage. He was 65. He was survived by his wife Carol, a former professor of child psychiatry at UCD, and their children, Andrew, Emma and Gareth.