Archibald McIndoe

Sir Archibald Hector McIndoe was a New Zealand plastic surgeon who spent his career in Britain and worked for the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. Born in Dunedin in 1900, he studied medicine at the University of Otago, held a fellowship at the Mayo Clinic, and moved to London in 1930, where his cousin Harold Gillies helped him into plastic surgery. At the Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead he led a centre for plastic and jaw surgery that treated badly burned aircrew, developed the walking-stalk skin graft, and noted that saline immersion aided healing. He also stressed rehabilitation and social reintegration, and patients formed the Guinea Pig Club. He co-founded the African Medical and Research Foundation in 1957, served as third president of the British Association of Plastic Surgeons, was knighted in 1947, and died in London in 1960.