My father, Peter Higgins, who has died aged 93, was a urologist in Stoke-on-Trent. A humane and considerate surgeon, he was committed to improving the experience of patients in the NHS, especially through his pioneering work in clinical audit. He also made advances in treating conditions including acute urinary retention. He had a voracious appetite for history, was a collector of ceramics, and nursed a lifelong, mildly disappointed love for Sheffield United.
He grew up in Sheffield, the son of Eileen (nee Morris) and Henry, the manager of a small branch of Boots, and shared his small bedroom with his grandfather, an Irish steelworker. The first in his family to attend university, he studied medicine at Balliol College, Oxford, working a variety of jobs – ice-cream salesman, Butlin’s entertainment officer – in the vacations. In Oxford, he met Pamela Deane, a student nurse; they married in 1955.
He did his clinical training at the London Hospital, and, in 1958, when their first son Robert was just over a year old, he started military service in the RAF. He was posted to Christmas Island in the Pacific, in the wake of the nuclear tests. At a lobster party, one of the officers passed a Geiger counter over the bellies of those present. After that, no more lobster.
In 1962 he undertook a year’s exchange in Montreal. For the last five weeks of the trip, the family camped their way across the US in the Mini they had shipped over from the UK, Pamela six months pregnant with their second son, Rupert. The Mini broke down at the top of the Rockies; he wrote up the adventure for the Manchester Guardian. In 1964, Peter was working on his MCh thesis when he was summoned to Heathrow, where an Ilyushin 18 was waiting for a small surgical team. They operated that night on the Polish president. He later speculated that no Polish surgeon was willing to take the responsibility: the patient, Aleksander Zawadzki, was clearly already dying, and duly did so later that year.
Peter was appointed a consultant in 1967 at what is now the Royal Stoke university hospital, where I was later born. For many years the city’s sole urological surgeon, he dealt with a heavy workload without accruing a waiting list. His modest private practice included performing vasectomies at a consulting room at our house, where I took it for granted that a succession of ashen-faced men would arrive on a Saturday morning. When the time came, he self-administered the procedure, without mishap.
The Potteries provided our father with one of his most enduring passions – commemorative pottery, of which he amassed an important collection. After retirement to the Cotswolds and then Oxford, he completed a PhD on medical care in prisons in the 19th century, which he wrote up for his book Punish or Treat? (2007). He was a charming raconteur, his droll wit influenced by his favourite novelist, Evelyn Waugh. In their later years, he and our mother travelled widely, until her death in 2018.
He is survived by Robert, Rupert and me, by four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, and by his sister, Shelagh.
