Nigel Keith Maybury was born in 1943 and is a retired general and vascular surgeon of wide experience. He trained at Oxford University and St Thomas's Hospital, London. He was a Wellcome Trust research fellow at the Middlesex Hospital, London and later a lecturer in surgery at the University of Leicester. He was appointed as a consultant surgeon at the Royal Albert Edward Infirmary in Wigan, Greater Manchester. He wrote his thesis for a DM from Oxford, on surgery, for duodenal ulcers-a major disease of the 20th century. His previous book published in 2014 was The End of the Golden Age of General Surgery, which describes the training and practice of a surgeon in the second half of the 20th century, before the dramatic changes in the practice of surgery that occurred across Europe at the beginning of the new millennium