Wael Manssour Fahmy was born in Cairo on 3 August 1928. He was the first son to be born to Mansour Fahmy, a doctor of philosophy who was the director of Alexandra University and his wife Insaf Serry, who was the director of girl’s education in the Egyptian Ministry of Culture. In Cairo, Wael attended Nasria and Orman primary school and Saedia secondary school. He studied medicine at Ein-Shams Medical School, graduating MB, BCh in 1952. House jobs followed at the Demerdash Hospital and the Helma Orthopaedic Hospital. He passed the fellowship of the college in 1963 and may have come to the UK that year. For a time he trained with Guy Pulvertaft who was a consultant hand surgeon at the Harlow Wood Orthopaedic Hospital near Mansfield and then he moved to Crewe Memorial Hospital to assist the consultant orthopaedic surgeon, Terence McSweeney. He passed the MCh Liverpool in 1967 and returned to Egypt to join the Medical Corps and take up the post of consultant orthopaedic surgeon to the Maadi and Helmiah Military Hospitals, where he worked from 1968 to 1972. Following those appointments he became professor of orthopaedic surgery at the Military Medical Academy in Cairo. He published widely on orthopaedic topics and especially on surgery of the hand. He had become fascinated by the complexity of the hand and in peripheral nerve surgery. With Egypt being involved in three wars in 1956, 1967 and 1973, there was much call for reconstruction work. At the Military Academy he established a replantation laboratory in 1970 and a microsurgery lab nine years later. He founded the Eastern Mediterranean Hand Society which eventually became a member of the International Federation for Societies for Surgery of the Hand (IFSSH) and published an annual journal *The Hand* in Egypt. At the 7th International Congress of the IFSSH in Vancouver, Canada in 1998 he was honoured as a pioneer of hand surgery. Outside medicine he was fascinated by motor mechanics and enjoyed underwater fishing. He married Magda on 9 February 1956 and they had a son and daughter. He died on 29 December 2003 aged 75.