John Segelov was born in Maitland, New South Wales, in 1929 and was educated at Newcastle High School. His medical training was at Sydney University from which he graduated MB BS in 1952, and his experience as resident medical officer at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital aroused his interest in neurosurgery as a career. In 1954 he was neurosurgical registrar at the same hospital before spending some time in the United Kingdom, working in Edinburgh and Manchester and obtaining the FRCS in 1955. He returned to the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in 1958 as honorary assistant neurosurgeon, while at the same time taking up appointments at Liverpool, Fairfield and Canterbury Hospitals, to all of which he provided a neurosurgical service for over thirty years. At the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital he took an early interest in the development of cerebral angiography. With Barrie Scrivener, the ENT surgeon, he visited the House Ear Institute of Los Angeles in the 1960s to study the developments in diagnosis and treatment of acoustic nerve tumours being pioneered there by Dr William House and, as a consequence, introduced the translabyrinthine operation to Sydney. With Scrivener, he operated on almost two hundred such tumours over the succeeding twenty five years. He was also interested in surgery of the spine and the operation of spinal fusion. His publications included papers on intracranial aneurysm and ossifying arachnoiditis as well as surveys of cerebral tumours. He was greatly involved in the affairs of the Neurosurgical Society of Australasia, in which he held every office including President, and was awarded the Society's medal in 1994. He served on the medical committee of the Royal Alfred Hospital, and was also its President. Segelov was a keen sea fisherman, and was interested in computer programming, designing a program for case management which was adopted by his own and other hospitals. He received the Order of Australia in 1993 for services to medicine, and died after a long illness from carcinoma of the colon in September 1996, survived by his wife, Maureen, son Andrew and daughter Michelle, and three grandchildren.