Nick Digard, a native of the Channel Islands, was born on 7 April 1951. His father, Joseph Claude Digard, was a civil servant. His mother, Jean née Hadfield, was a financial administrator. He was educated at Pierre Du Bois School and Elizabeth College, Guernsey, and studied medicine at University College Hospital. He completed junior posts at the Whittington and Basingstoke General Hospitals, before joining the UCH registrar training rotation, which included a stint at Stoke Mandeville and Portsmouth. He was appointed as a renal research fellow and senior registrar in renal replacement therapy, and later as an associate specialist, on the transplant unit under Maurice Slapak at St Mary's Hospital, Portsmouth, where he carried out a number of useful research projects, though seldom writing them up. He married Patricia Mary Ryan in 1974. They had two children, a girl, Helen Agnes, and a boy, Jean-Paul Marcus. He suffered from an alcohol addiction and, in the course of rehabilitation, developed cardiac ischaemia. He committed suicide on 11 November 1998.