Helen Christina Grant was an outstanding clinical neuroscientist and a colleague of impeccable professional and moral integrity. She was an exceptional teacher: she taught generations of medical students, neurologists, neurosurgeons, and neuropathologists, many of whom became leaders in their own fields.

Known as Wendy to her family, friends, and colleagues, she was born in 1922 in London to Donald and Irene Grant. Wendy’s early years and education reflected the peripatetic lifestyle of the family, attending no fewer than five schools in three different countries on two continents. Her father, having been trained as a Presbyterian minister at Edinburgh University, worked under the auspices of the American Quaker Foundation and later with other relief agencies to help in the reconstruction of war ravaged Europe. First they lived in Vienna, where in the Kindergarten, Grant learned perfect German with a Viennese accent. Her father’s new calling to organise the Students’ Christian Movement took the family to New Zealand for a while, before he was headhunted to become deputy director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation …