Ian McNicol Smith, known as ‘Mechanical’, was head of the orthopaedic department at Box Hill Hospital, Victoria, Australia. He was born in Paisley, Renfrewshire, Scotland on 23 April 1920. His father, Thomas Henry Smith, was a butcher; his mother was Helen McNicol Smith née Wilson. His elder brother, James Anstruther Smith, became a consultant anaesthetist, while their paternal uncle, J A Smith, was a general practitioner in Mirfield, Yorkshire. Smith was educated at the John Neilson Institution, Paisley and Strathallan School, Forgandenny, Perthshire, and went on to study at St John’s College, Cambridge and St Bartholomew’s Medical School in London. He qualified in 1943. He served as a surgeon lieutenant in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. He was a house surgeon at St Bartholomew’s, Hammersmith and North Middlesex hospitals, and then a registrar at Roehampton, Heatherwood and St Bartholomew’s hospitals. He gained his FRCS in 1954. In 1958, he went to Australia as a ship’s surgeon. He worked as an orthopaedic surgeon at Box Hill and Alfred hospitals, Victoria, Australia. He became head of the orthopaedic surgery unit at Box Hill Hospital, a position he retained until his retirement in 1985. Outside medicine he was interested in music, joinery and photography. In 1948, he married a Miss Gilbert. They had two sons and a daughter. Ian McNicol Smith died on 10 June 2014. He was 94.