Jason Giles Brice was born on 24 January 1927. Initially educated at a two-roomed Church of England School in the North Downs, he moved on to Gravesend Grammar School for Boys and started two years ahead of his age group. Due to the lack of science teachers during the second world war, he was more or less obliged to teach himself biology and, in so doing, developed a great interest in the methods and process of organ dissection. Having passed his higher school certificate in 1943, he remained at school for a further year, largely tutoring younger pupils before he was old enough to start university. It is said that his father encouraged him to embark on a career in medicine as he did not want him to be conscripted. In 1944 he entered Guy’s Hospital Medical School and won the Harris prize in anatomy in his first year. While there he was inspired by the work of a distinguished neurologist, Sir Charles Putnam Symonds, whom he was later to work with at the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases, Queen Square. On passing his MB, BS in 1949, he embarked on house jobs in general surgery and anatomy at Joyce Green Hospital in Dartford, Kent. After that, while working with Geoffrey Cureton Knight he began to study neurosurgery. For his national service he joined the RAFMC in 1950 and spent two years as a duty doctor. Incorrectly informed by the department of health that he needed to spend two years in general surgery before he took his specialism further, he then began work at the Woolwich Memorial Hospital, followed by a time at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School in Hammersmith. He passed the fellowship of the college in 1953. Although it seems that his seniors attempted to dissuade him, he then began to specialise in neurosurgery working with Murray Falconer at the Maudsley Hospital before joining Wylie McKissock at Atkinson Morley’s Hospital in Wimbledon. He then followed the latter to the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases and Great Ormond Street Hospital, becoming a senior registrar and learning, among other procedures, the process of performing lesional surgery for Parkinson’s disease. He remained at Queen Square until the early 1960’s, apart from 1959 during which year he visited Northwestern University in Chicago researching thalmic nuclei functions. Appointed a consultant neurosurgeon in Southampton in 1963, he was charged with establishing a specialist neurosciences centre to serve patients in Hampshire, Wiltshire, Dorset and the Isle of Wight. The Wessex Neurological Centre opened in 1965. He adopted a team approach to patient management in preference to the more traditional hierarchical approach of those days. An enthusiastic teacher, he had colourful ways of imparting neuroanatomy to registrars in psychiatry and established evening lectures for neurosurgical nurses. He was a pioneer of deep brain stimulation for the treatment of movement disorders such as those produced by Parkinson’s disease and multiple sclerosis. A long term member of the Society of British Neurological Surgeons (SBNS), he was its president from 1988 to 1990 and was awarded their medal in 2013 for services to British neurosurgery. At the college he was a member, and one time chairman, of the Court of Examiners. A keen rugby player in his youth, he also apparently wrote pantomimes when he was at medical school. He died on 1 October 2015 in Southampton aged 88 years and was survived by his wife, Gill, children Lorna and John, and grandchildren Chris, Nick, Allie and Josh.