He set up the neurosurgical unit at the Atkinson Morley Hospital, was Britain's most prolific leucotomist (lobotomist), and president of the Society of British Neurological Surgeons.
His father, originally from Lanarkshire, was a manager in a linoleum factory who wrote crime fiction under the name of Alan Graham and invented a machine for cutting sheets of material.
In 1936 McKissock visited Stockholm to study Swedish neurosurgeon Herbert Olivecrona's work, and then spent a year (1937-1938) on a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship in the United States and Canada.
[1] In 1939, at the outbreak of World War II, McKissock tried unsuccessfully to join the army as a neurosurgeon and instead was appointed to the neurosurgical unit at Leavesden Hospital.
[1] In the 1940s he favoured the standard Freeman-Watts leucotomy where holes were drilled in the side of the head and an instrument swept through the white matter to sever connections between the frontal lobes and the deeper structures in the brain.