Tom Menzies was born on 28 November 1922 in Crowborough, Sussex, to Major General Thomas Menzies, CB, OBE, JP, formerly of the RAMC, and Euphemia, née Anderson. He attended Aberdeen Grammar School and the University of Aberdeen Medical School, where he played rugby for the first XV and won the Keith medal in surgery in 1945. After house appointments on the medical and surgical professorial units in Aberdeen he entered the RAMC, where he was promoted to graded surgical specialist, serving in Aldershot and Colchester. In 1946 he married Margaret Ledingham Davidson, a nurse. After his National Service he returned to Aberdeen for the surgical registrar rotation, which included six short locums as consultant surgeon in the Orkney and Shetland Islands. After passing the Edinburgh Fellowship he became senior registrar at the Hammersmith Hospital, where he remained for the next ten years, and was much influenced by Ian Aird and R H Franklin. At the Hammersmith he organised a Fellowship course, and collaborated with Professor (later Sir) Christopher Booth in experimental work on small bowel function, and made a detailed study of carcinoma of the oesophagus (with Azzopardi) proving for the first time the separate origin of primary adenocarcinoma. In May 1966 he was appointed consultant general surgeon to Glasgow Royal Infirmary, where he continued to build up his interest in oesophageal carcinoma. He remained a general surgeon, and was one of the first to establish a breast screening unit in Cumbernauld. Tom's many interests outside medicine included gardening, stamp-collecting, fishing and hill-walking. Unhappily, his last years were clouded by ill-health, and he died on 19 August 1993, survived by his wife, daughters Margaret and Alison, son Tom and one granddaughter.