Peter Rack was born in Grimsby of Quaker stock on 27 October 1928. His father, Ralph Skinner Rack, was a chemical engineer, and his mother Elsie, née Horsman, was a marine biologist. His early education was at Society of Friends Schools in Wigton, Ackworth and Bootham between 1936 and 1946, following which he went up to Clare College, Cambridge, to read medicine, taking his BA in 1949 and graduating in 1952. While at medical school he won the Anderson prize in 1949. After a period as house physician at the London Hospital, he spent two years doing his National Service with the RAMC between 1954 and 1956. During that time he decided that surgery was where his future lay and from 1956 he set about learning the necessary skills in periods at various hospitals, gaining his FRCS in 1959. It was then that an interest in neuroscience began to emerge and as a junior doctor he worked with three of the leading neurosurgeons of the day - Douglas Northfield at the London, Walpole Lewin in the Army Head Injuries Unit and Brodie Hughes at Birmingham. He had been a registrar in Cardiff but it was as senior registrar at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham, that the time came that most influenced the direction of his career. The group in Birmingham, under the direction of Professor Brodie Hughes, was pioneering the use of surgical techniques to alleviate the symptoms of Parkinson's Disease. Rack was struck by the lack of physiological knowledge regarding the way the brain controlled muscles and movements. He then spent six months in Oslo with Professor Jan Jansen conducting physiological experiments and possibly building on his experiences as a Part II student in the neurophysiological heyday of the Cambridge department of physiology. His experiments showed for the first time how, by using precisely quantified and applied movements, the control of muscles was modified by the brain. It was at the age of 37, on the threshold of a highly promising career as a consultant neurosurgeon, that he took a major step which was highly unusual, becoming a lecturer in the department of physiology in the Medical School at Birmingham in 1965. In 1975 he was made reader in experimental neurology and in 1983 his distinction in research and teaching led to the award of a personal chair. He retired in 1992. In 1972 he had been awarded a Royal Society Travelling Fellowship, enabling him to take a sabbatical year of studying at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. Here he worked with Professor Robert Porter, studying the way the brain responded to unexpected movements, the measurement of the physical properties of muscles and tendons and the nervous control of muscles. All this provided a key insight into the origin of tremor in both normal and in Parkinson's Disease patients. Remarkably, he had the skill to construct precision machinery when this was not available to make the necessary measurements, and his manual skill was further put to good use in one of his hobbies, which was the making of beautiful furniture and clavichords to a professional standard. He was also a keen amateur flautist. A keen mountaineer, in the 1950s he was one of a British group which began to climb the harder Alpine routes, and he climbed intensively in the British Isles and in the Alps up to the highest standard of the time. He was a member of the Climbers' Club and he and his family spent much time in the Lake District. It was through his love of music that he came to meet Brenda, whom he married in 1956. She survives him, together with their four daughters - Mary, an anthropologist, Jane, a nurse, Lucy, a social administrator and Eleanor, a computer consultant. Peter Rack was killed in a climbing accident in the Lake District on 18 July 1994. There is a list of 39 publications with which he was associated, mainly on neuroscience subjects.