Kenneth McKee

George Kenneth McKee was an English orthopaedic surgeon, born in Ilford, Essex, on 5 January 1906 and died on 18 July 1991. His father was a medical practitioner who had moved from Ireland to England around 1900. McKee attended Chigwell School, studied medicine at St. Bartholomew's Hospital Medical College and received his Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1934. After working at the Sheffield Royal Hospital he was appointed consultant in orthopaedics at the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital in 1939. There he became one of the pioneers of hip replacement surgery in the 1950s. By the account of Hugh Phillips, a later President of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, McKee began experimenting with model hip joints in 1938 with dentists and an engineering firm in Norwich, and carried out his first primary hip replacement in 1951. He was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1972, received an honorary Cambridge doctorate of science in 1975 and honorary fellowship of the Royal Society of Medicine in 1986. A bust, McKee House and a road at the Norfolk and Norwich site remember him.