During World War II he served as a surgical specialist with the 8th Army in North Africa and Italy and was awarded the OBE for this service.

He entered the medical faculty of the University of Edinburgh in 1926 and five years later graduated MB ChB with honours and the award of the Pattison Prize in Clinical Surgery.

[5] His surgical division was selected to form the Vascular Injuries Centre for the British Forces in the Mediterranean theatre and he later published an account of this experience.

[6] For his contributions in this specialised field of military surgery, he was mentioned in dispatches and appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE).

[7] When the war ended in 1945, Mason Brown returned to the RHSC in Edinburgh where, after Ian Aird had moved to the Chair of Surgery at the Postgraduate Medical School in London and Miss Herzfeld had retired, he became surgeon-In-chief.

In this capacity he led a team of 27 distinguished authors in the production of what was the first major British textbook of paediatric surgery since the publication 18 years earlier of Sir John Fraser's single-handed magnum opus bearing the same title.

At the first meeting he was made a member of the founding executive together with Denis Browne (the first president), David Waterston, Peter Paul Rickham, and Harold Nixon.

He is commemorated by the Mason Brown Memorial Lectureship which every two years is awarded jointly by the RCSEd and the British Association of Paediatric Surgeons.