Donald Robertson Webster was professor of surgery at McGill University and surgeon-in-chief of the Royal Victoria Hospital, Montreal, Canada. He was born on 7 January 1912, the son of a doctor from Pictou, Nova Scotia, and graduated from Dalhousie University in 1925. After postgraduate studies at

John Alvah MacDougall qualified in medicine from Manchester in 1934. He settled in Vancouver, Canada, where he became surgeon to the Vancouver General Hospital and to the British Columbia Cancer Institute. He was Clinical Associate Professor to the department of surgery at the University of British