Former consultant neurosurgeon Liverpool, 1947–79 (b Calgary, Canada, 1915; q Edinburgh 1937; FRCS; MBE), died from pneumonia on 16 June 2000. Dick learnt his craft in the second world war, mainly in India. He ended with the rank of lieutenant colonel. He rejoined the neurosurgical unit in Oxford for head injury training and was appointed to the new unit in Liverpool in 1947. He showed an early interest in the surgical treatment of epilepsy and worked in Montreal for a time. Dick's patience and dogged persistence were ideally suited to the techniques for temporal lobectomy and hemispherectomy, as practised at that time. He seemed unaffected by procedures that commonly took 12 or more hours. He was a founder member of the Mersey Region Epilepsy Association and its chairman or president for 21 years. In addition to his long operations, Dick held long outpatient clinics and wrote very long outpatient letters. It was largely his work that has led to the development …