Liam Hugh Wright was born in Taranaki, New Zealand in December 1926. His father, William John Wright, fought in the first world war. His mother, Stella née Hickey had been the headmistress of Opunake School but retired from teaching after her marriage as the couple embarked on running the family farm. Liam was educated at Rahotu School and then at Opunake, before matriculating when he was 16 in 1942 from St Patrick’s College, Silverstream. He spent the war years from 1943 to 1946 working on the farm while his elder brother, Ralston, served in the airforce. After a while spent studying in Wellington, he proceeded to Dunedin University in 1948 and graduated MB, ChB in 1953. He very much enjoyed his student years, playing rugby and becoming president of the Otago University Students Association in 1951. After house jobs in Palmerston North, he became a general practitioner and moved with his family to Mangakino. His experience as a rural GP convinced him of the need for better gynaecological services and he embarked on a registrar job at the National Women’s Hospital (NWH) in Auckland. In 1959 he sailed to the UK with his wife and family, which by now consisted of four children aged from 6 weeks to 6 years. He worked in London, the Mansfield Hospital in Nottinghamshire and lectured at the Nuffield Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology in Oxford. He passed the fellowship of the college in 1961 and the family returned to New Zealand the following year. He returned to work at the NWH, set up a private practice and also became a founding member of the Middlemore Hospital Obstetric Unit. For a while he was also jointly in charge of an obstetric unit at the Mater Misericordiae (now Mercy) Hospital. On beginning to specialise in gynaecological malignancies – and cervical cancer in particular – he carried out significant amounts of radical pelvic surgery throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Later he became more involved with administrative tasks such as chair of the medical advisory committee to the Auckland Hospital Board and medical supervisor for the Mercy Hospital, where he was also appointed acting CEO for a while. Famous for his empathy with his patients, he continued to practice after retirement age, performing his last delivery in 1990 and last surgical intervention in 1995. At the Mercy Hospital he remained on the staff until the age of 74. Outside medicine he enjoyed camping – he and his wife made an annual trip each January to a quiet beach in Northland called Bland Bay and maintained the habit for 40 years. A regular bridge player, he also completed the *Herald* and *Guardian* crosswords daily, even when he was seriously ill. Devoted to his family, the death of his eldest son Christopher in a motorcycle accident in 1977 hit him hard. When he died in August 2011, he was survived by his wife, Barbara, and children, Peter a barrister, Mark who is a surgeon and Virginia who became a documentary producer in Christchurch.