Muriel Hilary Long was born in London, only daughter of Sidney Long OBE, a director of Beaverbrook Newspapers. She was educated at Lewisham Prendergast Grammar School and King's College Hospital. She was house surgeon to Sir Cecil Wakeley, was awarded a travelling scholarship of the University of London and spent a year in Vienna, Budapest and Berlin. After further house appointments in London she was appointed reader in surgery at Leeds University in 1936 and appointed Professor of Surgery at Lady Hardinge College, New Delhi, in 1939 but did not take up the appointment as, by that time, war had been declared. In 1940 she joined the RAMC as surgical specialist to the Military Hospital, Bath, where she met Thomas Knowles Boney, MD, then a Lieutenant Colonel, RAMC, who she married in 1942. After the war he returned to his post in Llandudno and she was appointed surgeon to Llandudno General Hospital. She retired in 1967, having been for 19 years the only woman surgeon in Wales. She was chairman of her hospital staff committee and highly respected for her diligance, kindness, energy and hospitality. In 1972 she and her husband moved to Malta and later to Guernsey where he died in 1975. She had one son, Guy, who was born in 1944 and he survived her, with two grandsons, when she died on 2 June 1984.