Peter Schurr was a consultant neurosurgeon at Guy’s and Maudsley hospitals, London. He was born in Brighton on 9 December 1920. His father, Christopher George Schurr, was an ophthalmic surgeon and his mother, Lilian Nellie Schurr née Abell, had been a ward sister; they met at University College Hospital. He was a great-grandson of William Archer Kent, a physician to Queen Victoria. After education at Prestonville House Preparatory School and Maiden Erlegh School in Reading, he gained a place at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge to read medicine. He completed his clinical training at University College Hospital and qualified in 1943. After appropriate pre-registration jobs, he joined the RAMC and served in Egypt and Greece as a general surgeon, with the rank of captain, between 1944 and 1947. He returned to civilian life and gained the FRCS in 1948. He then trained as a neurosurgeon at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford. In 1951, he had an Eli Lilly travelling fellowship, which funded a year at Harvard, where he studied cerebrospinal fluid physiology and hydrocephalus at Boston Children’s Hospital. In 1953, soon after his return to the UK, he obtained a post as a supernumerary senior registrar at the Guy’s and Maudsley neurosurgical unit, which up to that point had been run single-handed by Murray Falconer. In 1955, he was appointed as an independent consultant in the same unit. He retired from that post in 1985 and during those 30 years he saw many changes in clinical and operative practice, including the introduction of the operating microscope, direct brain imaging in the form of CT scanning of the head and spine and the beginnings of subspecialisation. Another consultant (J J Maccabe) was appointed in 1963, but in such a small unit he was obliged to do a great deal of general neurosurgery, however his special interests included paediatric neurosurgery, he preserved his interest in stereotactic methods and performed, in cooperation with his psychiatric colleagues, some careful psychosurgery. Upon the retirement of Murray Falconer in 1975 he became the director of the unit. He was academically active throughout his long and busy career writing some 45 peer-reviewed papers, numerous review articles and, after retiring, three books. The first was a biography of his great grandfather Benjamin Arthur Kent (*Benjamin's son* Royal Society of Medicine Services, c.1991), then a multi-authored book on hydrocephalus (*Hydrocephalus* Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993) and finally a biography of the neurosurgeon, Sir Geoffrey Jefferson (*So that was life: a biography of Sir Geoffrey Jefferson Kt CBE FRS MS FRCS (1886-1961): master of the neuroscience and man of letters* London, Royal Society of Medicine, c1997). His Army service had always been a significant part of his life and in 1975 he was delighted to be appointed as a civilian consultant to the new Queen Elizabeth Military Hospital at Woolwich. In addition to his clinical responsibilities and the Falklands conflict, he expanded teaching activities there; he preferred his resident medical officer to be a physician and he gave Army surgical trainees relevant experience by allowing them to work in the main neurosurgical unit. In 1986, just after he retired, he was awarded the CBE from the Army List. He had numerous professional appointments and honours. He was a visiting academic to John Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, to the American University in Beirut, and to the universities of Cincinnati, Wake Forest in the USA and Alexandria in Egypt. Immediately after retirement he became the sub-dean for postgraduate studies at Guy’s. He served as president of the Society of British Neurological Surgeons from 1982 to 1984, was president of the Harveian Society of London and held various offices in the Royal Society of Medicine. He met his wife Susan (née Todd) at a dance in 1947 and they were married in 1949. The marriage was a long and happy one with two daughters and a son in the family. Although his life was first and foremost neurosurgery, throughout it he always had alternative interests in the humanities, shared by his wife Susan. He was a keen musician having played the piano since his youth and he built a number of string instruments, culminating in the construction of a harpsichord from a kit. He found pleasure in painting, mostly in oils, and was a keen reader, had learnt German and Farsi and he appreciated and wrote poetry. They retired to Ufford in Suffolk in 1991 and lived happily there. Unfortunately, Susan died in 2011, thereafter he was supported by his family, passing his later years in a care home, until he suffered a severe stroke, from the effects of which he died on 29 October 2019. He was 98.