Robert Bransby Zachary retired to Australia in 1978, leaving behind a career which started as a pharmacist, and later graduating from Leeds University in 1940 with a medical degree (first classs honours and the Gold Medal, with prizes in surgery and clinical medicine). After being made a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1943, he was appointed the first full-time surgeon at the Sheffield Children's hospital in 1947. Other career highlights included war-time research into Peripheral Nerve Injuries; being elected the Hunterian Professor at the Royal College of Surgeons (1944); and setting up the British Association of Paediatric Surgeons. Being a founding member of the Society for Research into Hydrocephalus and Spina Bifida, Zachary pioneered techiques that saw spina bifida babies being operated on as soon as possible after birth, thus reducing the mortality rates of the disease worldwide. He moved to Canada in the mid 1990s.
After translating the English edition of Vaclav Tosovsky's (q.v.) novel, Ve trpytnem mori je Kreta (1984), Zachary drew on this experience and his knowledge as a paediatric surgeon to later collaborate with Tosovsky in writing the historical novel, Pain? No!
(1991). As a sugeon, Zachary co-authored textbooks such as the Colour Atlas of Paediatric Surgical Diagnosis (1981), demonstrated his concern with medical ethics by writing To Treat or Not to Treat (1987?), and contributed to Trends in Biomedical Regulation (1990). He also wrote Surgeon to a Child: Memoirs of a Paediatric Surgeon (1987).
