Peter Gortvai, the only son of William, an obstetric surgeon and his wife Elizabeth, née Foldi, LDSRCS, was born on 1 December 1927. He attended Trinity College, Cambridge, where he completed his Natural Sciences Tripos in 1951 and won the Tripos prize. He then went to the London Hospital from 1951 to 1954 where he won the George Riddoch Prize in Neurology. After various junior posts, including that of registrar at the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases, he went to Harvard as a Fulbright fellow, and research and clinical fellow. He was appointed consultant neurosurgeon at the NE Thames regional centre, Oldchurch, Romford, and at Bart's, and from 1984 to 1991 was lecturer in surgery at St Bart's Medical College, where in 1992 he was appointed a governor. In 1991 he was appointed visiting professor of neurosurgery to St John's Hospital, Budapest, Hungary. He spoke Hungarian and German, and had some knowledge of French and Italian. He published some thirty articles on neurological surgery and allied sciences. In 1963 he married Professor Dame Rosalinde Hurley, who qualified in both medicine and law, becoming a barrister in the Inner Temple and a consultant pathologist in microbiology. She survived him when he died on 20 February 1995.