Jim Glenn was an internationally celebrated urologist, a former chief of urology at Duke University and dean of Emory University school of medicine. He was born in Lexington, Kentucky, and educated at the University High School there, from which he went to Rochester University and afterwards to Duke University to study medicine, qualifying in 1952. He specialised in urology and completed a surgical residency at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston and trained in urology at Duke University. He served briefly on the academic staff at Yale and at Wake Forest University, before returning to Duke in 1963 as a professor and later a chief of urology. He went on to Emory University in Atlanta as dean of the medical school and was later president of Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City. He then returned to Kentucky, where he was director of the Markey Cancer Center at the University of Kentucky from 1989 to 1993 and chief of staff at the University of Kentucky Hospital from 1993 to 1996. He was acting chairman of surgery at the University of Kentucky from 1996 to 1998. He was a born organiser, becoming president of the American Association of Genitourinary Surgeons in 1993. A past president of the Société Internationale d’Urologie, in 2007 he received that organisation’s highest honour. He was a former governor of the American College of Surgeons and a former president of the American Urological Association. He received the Association’s lifetime achievement award in 1994. He was a frequent visitor to England, and always went out of his way to welcome visitors from the UK. He was made an honorary fellow of our College in 1987. He was awarded the St Paul’s medal of the British Association of Urological Surgeons in 1996. He died on 10 June 2009, leaving his widow Gay née Elste Darsie, two sons (Cambridge F Glenn II and James M Glenn), two daughters (Sarah Brooke Glenn and Nancy Carrick Glenn) and seven grandchildren.