Graeme Patrick Duffy, the son of Patrick Duffy, tram driver, and Madge Duffy, who was a nurse, was born of Irish stock in Wellington, New Zealand, on 12 December 1930. He attended Rongotai College where he was head boy, school boxing champion and in the rugby first fifteen. He secured a scholarship to study medicine at the University of Otago and graduated in 1955. Following resident and other appointments at Dunedin, Gisborne and Palmerston North, in New Zealand, he came to England in 1961 where he worked as resident surgical officer at Kingston-upon-Thames Hospital; registrar in neurosurgery at the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases, and then senior registrar to the department of neurosurgery in Birmingham. During that period he passed the MRCP (neurology) in Edinburgh and the English Fellowship. He also worked for three months as a clinical associate in the University department of neurosurgery at Gothenburg, as well as with an Oxfam team in Nigeria, and as a locum consultant surgeon in Zambia. In 1967 he was appointed consultant neurosurgeon to the Birmingham Regional Hospitals Board at the Midland Centre for Neurosurgery and Neurology. Some five years later he spent one year in the Bahamas as consultant neurosurgeon and head of the department of neurology and neurosurgery to the Princess Margaret Hospital, Nassau. In December 1973 he finally moved to Tasmania as head of the department of neurosurgery at the Royal Hobart Hospital. Graeme Duffy published papers on orbital injuries, anterior communicating artery aneurysms, the aetiology of spontaneous subarachnoid haemorrhage and the anterior approach for intervertebral disc surgery. His membership of a number of societies and associations included the Society of British Neurosurgeons, the Neurological Society of Australasia, the Royal Society of Tasmania and the Pan-American Medical Association. Outside his professional life he was always interested in riding and kept six horses. He was also a keen supporter of his local pony club and was latterly its president. He was twice married. By his first wife he had a daughter, Michele, who is an anaesthetist, and two sons, Christopher and Nicholas, who are respectively physician and general practitioner; and, after her death, he married Karen Jean Richmond in 1973. At the time of his death on 11 March, 1990, he was survived by the children of his first marriage, his wife and their 15-year old daughter, Kate.