James Dalrymple was a general and orthopaedic surgeon in the UK, Canada, Peru and South Africa, and later in his career became a gender reassignment surgeon. He was born in Cardiff on 20 December 1931, the son of Samuel Beggs Dalrymple, a medical practitioner, and Marjorie Dalrymple née Oxenham. He attended Neath County Grammar School and then Wanstead County High School in London, and went on to study medicine at Charing Cross Hospital Medical School. He qualified in 1955. He was a resident obstetric officer at Charing Cross Hospital and a house surgeon at Highlands Hospital, Southgate, before carrying out his National Service in the RAMC from January 1957 to December 1958. In 1959, he was a senior casualty officer at the Prince of Wales Hospital in Tottenham, London, and then, from 1961 to 1963, he became a surgical registrar at the Royal Masonic Hospital, also in London. During this period, he was also a clinical assistant to Clifford Naunton Morgan at St Mark's Hospital. In August 1963, he became a surgical registrar in Bath, Somerset, and, in 1965, at the London Hospital. He was briefly a surgical assistant at Darlington Memorial Hospital, County Durham. In late 1967 he moved to Canada, where he was first an assistant in orthopaedic surgery at Oshawa General Hospital, Ontario, and was then appointed as a consultant surgeon for Port Perry and Uxbridge hospitals, Ontario. In 1970, he went to Peru, where he helped establish the surgical department of Hospital Amazónico Albert Schweitzer in Pucallpa, a charity foundation for the poor. He was forced to leave in 1975 when the hospital ran out of money. He moved on to South Africa, where from October 1975 to December 1977 he was a principal surgical specialist and later medical superintendent at Umtata Hospital in Transkei. He briefly returned to Canada, where he was a surgeon at Inuvik General Hospital, North West Territories. In 1979, he went back to the UK, where he was a locum senior registrar at the London Hospital on the general and cardiothoracic unit, and at Olchurch and Rush Green hospitals, Essex. He was later a surgical registrar at St Andrew's Hospital, Bow, London. In the early 1980s he trained in gender reassignment surgery under Peter Philip and worked at Charing Cross Hospital. He also had an extensive private practice. He performed over 2,000 male-to-female transgender surgeries before he retired in the early 2000s. He was married and had two children. James Dalrymple died in 2014.