Brian Pickard led the ear, nose and throat department at St George’s Hospital, London, for many years, being particularly influential in establishing the new premises at Tooting on the move from Hyde Park Corner. Technically highly-skilled, his insight and compassionate care for his patients and respect for his colleagues set the highest standards to which juniors and students aspired. Brian Harold Pickard was born in London on 14 February 1922, the son of Alfred Harold Pickard (a civil servant working at South Africa House before independence) and Winifred Sarah Pickard, daughter of Thomas Cockrill, an architect. One of three boys, he went to school at Eltham College in Mottingham, Kent between 1932 and 1940. One brother was killed at the beginning of the Second World War, and it was after witnessing the death of his elder brother in a road accident at the age of ten that Brian declared that he would ensure that he would never feel so helpless again and that he would become a doctor. Qualifying with the LMSSA in November 1945, Brian graduated from Guy’s in November 1946. He initially worked at Great Ormond Street before serving in the Royal Air Force Medical Services for two years, returning to civilian hospital practice at King’s College Hospital in 1950. He was subsequently a consultant ear, nose and throat surgeon and head of department at St George’s Hospital, London, also an honorary consultant to Moorfield’s Eye Hospital, London and Dreadnought Seamen’s Hospital, Greenwich, continuing in an honorary capacity after his retirement from the NHS. Brian was appointed as an honorary consultant to L’Hôpital Français in 1964 and to the Dispensaire Français, London. For his unpaid services, he was invested as a Chevalier de l’Ordre National du Mérite (France) in 1970. He was also a liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Apothecaries. He also enjoyed his role as a visiting consultant ear, nose and throat surgeon to the Island of St Helena in the South Atlantic, making two long distance sea voyages on the RMS *St Helena* on behalf of the Ministry of Overseas Development. He was held in high regard by the islanders and their medical practitioners. Whilst in the RAF, he learned to fly, thus beginning a lifelong passion and involvement with aviation and flight safety. He held a pilot’s licence for the rest of his life, including the same instrument flying qualification used by professional pilots, and regularly flew his Chipmunk or Piper aircraft to meetings throughout the UK and Europe. One epic involved a flight to Poland at the height of the Cold War to attend a congress of the European Strabismology Association – as usual Brian confounded those who said that it could not be done. He had a special interest in the effects of flight on human physiology, encouraging his junior colleagues to join him flying to assist their understanding of the aviation environment. He used his clinical acumen and surgical skills to facilitate the return to flying fitness of many grateful aviators who had feared ENT pathology might mean the end of their flying careers. Brian Pickard was secretary, then president, of the British Medical Pilots Association and for many years was an active and influential member of the General Aviation Safety Council. He was a liveryman of the Guild of Air Pilots and Air Navigators, proceeding to master in 1979, a singular honour and recognition for a non-professional aviator. For many years, he represented the Guild on the medical advisory panel of the Civil Aviation Authority. After retiring from the NHS, Brian acted as an aviation medical examiner on behalf of the Civil Aviation Authority, assessing the fitness of professional and private pilots to exercise the privileges of their licences. Sailing was Brian Pickard’s other passion, with a Snowbird berthed at Walton and Frinton Yacht Club. He was honorary medical officer to the Royal National Lifeboat Institution’s Walton and Frinton Lifeboat and took great pride in sponsoring and naming a buoy in the seaward channel. As commodore of the London Hospitals Sailing Club he supported and encouraged generations of medical students in their sailing activities. Modest and self-effacing, Brian’s apparent unhurried and measured pace belied a competent and timely manner; he had the ability to make the individual feel that whatever they were saying was the most important thing in the world. A gentle man, he was a deep and analytical thinker and encouraged colleagues to reflect on their practice and actions, always to consider outcomes and alternatives. Brian appreciated music and the arts and had been a keen cellist. He mentioned to his daughter that his Huguenot ancestors had been clockmakers and that operating on the ear was similarly intricate. He described himself as an artisan and not an intellectual, although his extensive library belied that suggestion. Like many, he often said that surgery was a trade and not a profession; Brian Pickard’s life demonstrated the fallacy of this assertion. He married his childhood sweetheart, Joan Daisy Packham, in 1944 and they went on to have two sons and two daughters (one of whom is the mother of Jonathan Yeo, the acclaimed portrait artist). He secondly married Diana Stokes in 1987; their daughter is a paediatrician. Brian Pickard died on 13 July 2018. He was 96. A celebration of his life was held at the Regent Street Cinema, London, in September 2018. This might be thought an unusual location for one so eminent and respected, but his elder daughter is chair of the governors at Westminster University, which owns the cinema, and Brian was by his own admission an atheist and occasional agnostic – thus entirely appropriate.