Brian Higgs was a consultant general surgeon in Wycombe and Amersham. He was born in Bedford on 21 June 1935, and was educated at Bedford College and then Caius College, Cambridge, where he studied medicine. In 1957 he went on to Westminster Hospital Medical School, where he won several prizes, including the Hanbury and Arthur Evans memorial prizes. He qualified MRCS LRCP in 1959. He was then a house surgeon at Gordon Hospital, London, where he worked under Lawrence Abel. He went on to gain experience in a wide range of surgical specialties. He was a research assistant at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, USA, and a senior registrar at St Peter's Hospital for Stone and St Thomas' Hospital, before he was appointed to a consultant post at Wycombe Hospital in January 1969. He retired in 1998, due to ill health, and spent 10 years battling leukaemia. He eventually died on 4 October 2008. He was 73. In 2007 he had married his long term partner, Rosemary. He was survived by her, his two sons and by his three grandchildren.