Bruce Duncan was head of the ENT department at Wellington Hospital, New Zealand and an allergist. He was born on 11 June 1920 at Wellington. He qualified in 1943 and held house surgeon and house physician posts at Wellington Hospital from 1944 to 1945. He went on to registrar appointments in the eye and ENT departments at Wellington from 1945 to 1947, which included a period spent with the Second New Zealand Expeditionary Force in Japan. He then went to the UK for postgraduate studies, first at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary and then as a house surgeon and later registrar at the Royal National Throat, Nose and Ear Hospital, London (from 1949 to 1951). He gained his fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh in 1949 and of the Royal College of Surgeons of England in 1951. He returned to New Zealand, as Wellington’s first ENT surgeon to hold fellowships from the Edinburgh and English Royal Colleges. He was an ENT surgeon at the Wellington and Hutt hospitals until 1962. He was subsequently a visiting ENT surgeon and visiting otologist in the audiology department at Wellington Hospital until 1979, and head of the ENT department from 1968 to 1976. He was a visiting senior otologist at Palmerston Hospital from 1980 to 1987. He retired from his private practice in 1999. He was he first person in his field to use microsurgery in the inner ear and introduced binocular surgery to New Zealand. He realised early on that surgery was not helping his patients with chronic sinus problems and decided to train as an allergist. He became a fellow of the American Academy of Otolaryngic Allergy in 1974 and founded the first allergy clinic at Wellington Hospital. In the 1970s he pioneered food allergy testing and early on appreciated the importance of gluten and grain allergies. He devised a no ‘old world grass grains’ exclusion diet and helped his patients obtain gluten free products. He believed that medications that suppressed symptoms were not helpful for people with chronic health conditions, and devised methods to address underlying stressors and help cells detoxify. By the early 1980s he was using provocative-neutralisation techniques to diagnose and treat food, pollen and mould allergies. He also pioneered this treatment for latent viruses, work which was controversial. He specialised in treating people who were very debilitated and had already tried conventional and alternative treatments. His writings included two books *The hidden viruses within you: discover the new latent viral approach to body, mental, and functional illnesses* (Viroprint, Wellington, 1993) and *CFIDS, fibromyalgia and the virus-allergy link: new therapy for chronic functional illnesses* (CRC Press, 2001). He was devoted to his family and was a music lover. Duncan died in Wellington on 9 September 2004. He was 84.