William Bryan Jennett CBE (1 March 1926 – 26 January 2008)[1][2] was a British neurosurgeon, a faculty member at the University of Glasgow Medical School, and the first full-time chair of neurosurgery in Scotland.

[4] He first moved to rural Scotland and later to Southport, Lancashire where he attended King George V Grammar School before training as a doctor at the University of Liverpool.

He considered a permanent move to America after a one-year Rockefeller Fellowship at UCLA, but was headhunted in 1963 for a new combined NHS/University position in Glasgow.

In 1972 working with Dr Plum of America, Jennett published The Persistent Vegetative State – defining a condition and coining a phrase which remains in widespread use today.

[6] Jennett was in demand as a speaker and in the UK contributed to medical panels and was called to Court as an expert witness, most notably for the Tony Bland case.

[7] He worked with Barbara Stocking and Chris Ham of the King's Fund to establish a series of Consensus Conferences to deal with the appropriate use of high-cost medical technology.

In his later years, he was named Commander of the Order of the British Empire[8] (CBE) and received an honorary doctorate from St Andrews University.