William Fleming Gordon was a psychiatrist in Canada. Born on 3 July 1926 in Glasgow, he was the son of William Smith Fleming, a civil servant, and his wife, Alexandrina née Macadam. After attending Allan Glen’s High School, he studied at Glasgow University qualifying MB ChB in 1948. While in Scotland he did house jobs at the Western Infirmary in Glasgow where he was mentored by T Murray. Later, working in London, he was influenced by the surgeons Desmond Marriott Cooper at the Miller General Hospital and Joseph Thompson at Queen Mary’s. From 1949 to 1951 he served as a flight lieutenant in the RAF in Malaya. After his war service he passed the fellowship of the college in 1955 before travelling to Australia where it would seem that he decided to change specialty and study psychiatry. He co-authored a paper in the Journal of Mental Science in 1962 on the use of a particular drug for depression in the elderly based on a study at St Thomas’s Psychiatric Hospital in London, Ontario so it is likely that, by then, he was living and working in Canada. He produced a follow up article nearly 20 years later therefore he may well have remained at St Thomas’s throughout his career. He married Nesta Lewis in 1955 and they had a son and two daughters. Outside medicine he enjoyed playing the piano and gardening. He died on 11 October 2003, aged 77.