Paul Kirton Pybus was educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and St Mary's Hospital, qualifying in 1947. After house appointments at St Mary's and at the Royal Marsden, he became surgical registrar at St Alban's City Hospital. After gaining his Fellowship in 1955, he was appointed surgical registrar at the Torbay and Newton Abbott Hospitals. In 1960 he went to Kenya as visiting surgeon to the Nakaru War Memorial Hospital. Two years later he moved to South Africa where he spent the rest of his life, first as assistant medical superintendent at Eshowe Provincial Hospital, Natal and later as surgical registrar to the King Edward VII Non-European Hospital, Durban, before serving for some years as senior surgeon at the Edendale Hospital, Pietermaritzburg. He then practised privately as a surgeon in that city, where he died on 9 May 1988.