John McNeur was born on 12 July 1919 at Whakatane, New Zealand, the son of William McNeur, a Presbyterian minister and his wife Annie, née Clarke. He was educated at Otago Boys' High School and Otago University Medical School in Dunedin, where he qualified in 1943. After house appointments in Dunedin, he served as a medical officer with the Royal New Zealand Air Force from 1943 to 1946, serving in the Pacific theatre of war. Later on he also served with a surgical team in the Vietnam war in 1968. After demobilisation in 1946 he returned to Dunedin, where he worked as an orthopaedic registrar, before coming to London to take his FRCS. He was appointed registrar at the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital in 1952, then senior registrar and finally RSO. He emigrated to Australia in 1954 and became assistant orthopaedic surgeon to the Austin Hospital and then in 1956 consultant surgeon at the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, a post he held until 1979. John McNeur was a much respected orthopaedic surgeon in Australia whose main interests lay in the field of hip and knee replacement, and who wrote extensively about bone healing and non-union of fractures, especially of the femoral neck. He became consultant to the Australian Ballet Company and operated on various well-known Australian sportsmen and ballerinas. He was elected Vice-President of the Australian Orthopaedic Association and in 1972 he was appointed associate Professor of Orthopaedics at Monash University until his retirement in 1984. A man of great energy and charm, John McNeur was an enthusiastic gardener who landscaped his two acre garden in the Dandenong range of hills east of Melbourne. On 18 March 1944 he married Gladys Minto-Wilson and they had four children, three daughters and a son, and eight grandchildren, all of whom survived him. He died on 20 April 1993, aged 74.