Obituary—when somebody close to us dies, part of our future dies with them: John A. Fixsen, MChir, FRCS

It is always difficult to write about individuals who are close to you and who forged you in your formative years. In August 2014, Mr. John A. Fixsen, MChir, FRCS, Consultant Emeritus in Paediatric Orthopaedics at The Hospital for Sick Children, Great Ormond Street Hospital, London, and Consultant Orthopaedic Surgeon Emeritus at St Bartholomew? s Hospital, London, died in his sleep. I knew of Mr. Fixsen, but I met Mr. Fixsen in 1987, when I was appointed a Lecturer at the Institute of Child Health, and Honorary Registrar in his department. At the time, I still did not understand much of the British system of training, with the multitude of grades for junior doctors, but I knew one thing: it was jolly good! Mr. Fixsen took me under his wing and pushed me to love Paediatric Orthopaedics. My job was mainly academic, and I was leading a team of nine people to study the effects of intensive training in young athletes, the Training of Young Athletes (TOYA) study. I learnt that he was ? JAF ? when his trainees spoke of him and soon realized that he had the most encyclopaedic knowledge of orthopaedics that I had ever encountered. After the afternoon ward round, which in reality would be in the early evening, the whole team would convene at the Lamb, the great pub in Lambs Conduit Street, to talk about life, and for John to have two half pints of bitter. There, at one stage, he revealed that he had been fluent in Russian. As he had been a conscript in the Cold War era, one of us asked him whether he had been a spy. He never answered! I spent 4 years at Great Ormond Street, and JAF taught me about Paediatric Orthopaedics. His vision was, and remains, unique. He was, at one stage, the foremost paediatric orthopod in the English speaking world,