Sir Archibald Hector McIndoe CBE FRCS (4 May 1900 – 11 April 1960) was a New Zealand plastic surgeon who worked for the Royal Air Force during the Second World War.

He worked in the clinic as First Assistant in Pathological Anatomy 1925–1927 and published several papers on chronic liver disease.

When McIndoe could not find work, his cousin Sir Harold Gillies, an otolaryngologist specialising in plastic surgery (who now has an operation for reducing a broken cheekbone named after himself), invited him to join the private practice he ran with Rainsford Mowlem and offered him a job at St Bartholomew's Hospital, where he became a clinical assistant.

Gillies went to Rooksdown House near Basingstoke, which became the principal army plastic surgery unit; Tommy Kilner (who had worked with Gillies during the First World War, and who now has a surgical instrument named after him, the kilner cheek retractor), went to Queen Mary's Hospital, Roehampton, and Mowlem to St Albans.

McIndoe moved to the recently rebuilt Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead, Sussex, and founded a Centre for Plastic and Jaw Surgery.

He not only developed new techniques for treating badly burned faces and hands but also recognised the importance of the rehabilitation of the casualties and particularly of social reintegration back into normal life.

[5] Important work included development of the walking-stalk skin graft, and the discovery that immersion in saline promoted healing as well as improving survival rates for victims with extensive burns – this was a serendipitous discovery drawn from observation of differential healing rates in pilots who had come down on land and in the sea.

McIndoe was created CBE in 1944 and after the war he received a number of British and foreign honours, including a Commandeur de la Légion d'honneur (Commander of the Legion of Honour)[7] and was knighted in 1947 for his remarkable work on restoring the minds and bodies of the burnt young pilots of the Second World War through his innovative reconstructive surgery techniques.

Archibald McIndoe died in his sleep of a heart attack on 11 April 1960, aged 59, in his house at 84 Albion Gate, London.

[10] He was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium, and his ashes were given the unique honour for a civilian of being buried at the Royal Air Force church of St Clement Danes in London.

[11] On 22 March 1961, the British Minister of Health opened the Blond McIndoe Centre named in his honour at the Queen Victoria Hospital, East Grinstead.

A bronze monument commemorating McIndoe by Martin Jennings, whose own father was one of his patients, was unveiled by Princess Anne in East Grinstead High Street, in front of Sackville College, in 2014.