Robert Bendavid was a pillar of global hernia surgery. His work at the Shouldice Hospital, where I spent some time and met him in person, has spread throughout the world. Thanks to the dozens and dozens, if not hundreds, of live surgeries he performed at leading international meetings, including two European Hernia Society congresses, in 1996 and 2001, organised by me in Milan.
Robert Bendavid had a remarkable mind and was hugely cultured both in the humanities and in scientific spheres; above all he boasted great intellectual honesty.
For all these reasons, he will be greatly missed by international academia. I am both profoundly moved and honoured to be able to pay tribute to him in this journal, a publication with which, in recent times, he had such a close involvement, both as an Associate Editor and also as an author of the Forum on primary inguinal hernia published in issue no. 2.