Harland Rees was born on 21 September 1909 at Port Elizabeth, South Africa, into a medical family. His father, David Charles Rees, was a specialist in tropical medicine and had served in Lugard's frontier force, which kept the French at bay in West Africa in 1897. Four years later, he went to South

Peter Boreham was a much-loved and highly respected general surgeon in Cheltenham with a major urological interest. He was born on 26 May 1922 in Szechuan, China, into a missionary family. He was the second son of the Reverend Frederick Boreham and his wife Mildred née Slater: an older brother, Doug

Born at Stretford, near Manchester, on 2 February 1874, the second child and eldest son of John Henry Burgess, a merchant, and his wife, nee Sharrocks. He was educated at Rose Hill School, Bowden, Cheshire and, after a year in a shipping office, at Owens College, Manchester, where he won the Dalton

Born on 5 August 1888 at Penrhiwfer, South Wales, son of Edwin Hammond, colliery owner, and Jane Jenkins his wife. He was educated at Cheltenham College, and at St Bartholomew's Hospital from 1907, where he won a junior scholarship in anatomy and physiology and the Treasurer's and Foster prizes in a

Born at Brooklands, Blackheath Park, SE on 30 March 1878, the second child of the marriage of Joseph Kidd, MD, with Frances Rouse, his second wife. His father, the seventeenth of a family of eighteen, was a well-known homoeopathic physician in London; a brother by a previous marriage was Percy Kidd,

Derek Packham was head of the urology department at King's. He was born on 25 April 1932 in a tiny house off the Walworth Road in South East London, the only child of Albert William Packham, a local butcher. His mother was Jessie née Symonds. His second name was 'Albert', much to his relief, as he w

Robert 'Bobbie' Cox, formerly senior surgeon to the Westminster Hospital, was born in Batu Gajah, Perak, Malaya, on 24 October 1912, the son of Irish parents who came from Cork. His father, Robert, was a doctor, and his mother, Mary Ann neé Cummings, a nurse. At the age of eight, the family relocate

Born on 3 September 1876 son of Vincent Thomas Thompson QC, Assistant Recorder of Leeds, he came of a family many of whose members distinguished themselves through three or four generations in law, medicine, and administrative or academic work; they were related by marriage to similar prominent prof

Noel James Bonnin was born on Christmas Day 1909 in Adelaide. He was the son of Winifred, née Turpin, and James Atkinson Bonnin who had become a Fellow of the College in 1898 and was a Foundation Fellow of the Royal Australian College of Surgeons in 1927. His older brother, Lansell, was an orthopaed

Born on 24 September 1897, son of Lieutenant-Colonel H L Donovan RAMC, he was one of a large family which contributed notably to medicine and the Services. Major-General Sir Patrick Hehir, Indian Medical Service, was an uncle, and three of Donovan's brothers became well-known Birmingham doctors.

‘Kwashie’ Quartey had an international reputation for his work on the surgery of urethral stricture, and was one of the father figures of surgery in his home country, Ghana. He was the sixth of the seven children of Peter David Quartey snr, headmaster of the Government Junior School in James Town, a

Sir Norman Blacklock combined several careers; as a distinguished surgeon in the Navy, later as professor of urology at the University of Manchester, and as medical adviser to the Queen on her official trips abroad. He was born in Glasgow on 5 February 1928, the son of John William Stewart Blacklock