L J (Bill) Nye was born in Rockhampton in 1891. His father was an engineer who came to Rockhampton from Maidstone, Kent, to build the gasworks and was so attracted to the country that he decided to remain there as manager. LJ was educated at Rockhampton and Brisbane Grammar Schools and graduated an MB from Sydney in 1914. He joined the AIF on the outbreak of war but was seconded to the RAMC and served in a British regiment. After being wounded he served at a recruit depot at Dover and, later, as an operating surgeon at a British Field Hospital in France. He had been one of the MOs who were rushed forward to help victims of the first gas attack in 1915 and on returning to the front lines he was himself gassed and subsequently invalided home in 1917.

He became superintendent of the Atherton District Hospital and introduced x-ray, blood transfusions and other modern practices with which he had become familiar while overseas. It was an extremely demanding position which involved much travelling, often on horseback. In his last year there he performed 428 operations requiring anaesthesia as well as attending 213 confinements. In his spare time he was president of the RSL, took a principal part in founding the tennis competition, the Golf Club and the Dramatic Society, and also in fundraising for the new hospital built in 1922.

He moved to Brisbane in 1926, establishing a practice on Wickham Terrace, and was a physician to out-patients at the Brisbane General Hospital from 1927 to 1931. During this period he expanded on the work Drs Gibson and Turner had done on chronic nephritis and lead poisoning in children. Following a series of his papers on the subject which appeared in the Australian Medical Journal he published in 1933 Chronic Nephritis and Lead Poisoning which so concerned the Lead Industry Cartel that they commissioned a "scientific" monograph to refute it. Although anti-lead paint legislation had been enacted years previously (due to the efforts of Drs Turner, Jeffries and Lockhart-Gibson) it was being ignored. With support from the Premier, Forgan-Smith, and the Communist secretary of the Painters' Union, LJ was able to explain to a meeting of painters the dangers associated with lead paint and from then on they refused to use it. The final enactment prohibiting the use of lead paint did not become law until 1956, but the painters' embargo had virtually eliminated its use over twenty years earlier.

In 1930, with Drs Bostock (qv) and Power, he founded the Brisbane Clinic, a group practice of specialists, and incurred the active antipathy of the medical establishment as it was a new concept in Australia. Prior to this he had been on the State Council of the BMA but was not re-elected. Despite rejection he remained an active member and served on the ethics committee from 1942 to 1968, and was also chairman of the building sub-committee which in 1958 organized the transfer of BMA Headquarters from Wickham Terrace to Kelvin Grove.

With Dr Earnshaw (qv) he developed the Medical & Allied Professions Superannuation Plan which provided a pension system for old doctors, and he was also chairman of the state committee of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians. As with the Mayo Clinic, the Brisbane Clinic held regular clinical meetings at a time when post-graduate education was almost non-existent in Brisbane. As well as attendance by staff members, regular visitors included Professor Duhig (qv 1), Drs PA Earnshaw, Aubrey Pye, Noel Gutteridge, and, during the war, many medical officers from the US forces.

Hyperactive but unobtrusive in the community, he was on the senate of Queensland University, from 1961 to 1963, and initiated many projects and bequests. He was a member of Legacy, the Australian-American Association, Australian-Asian Society, Marriage Guidance Council, Sub-Normal Childrens' Welfare Association (now Endeavour Foundation), International House (Qld. Uni.) and also a foundation member of an early conservation movement, the Save the Trees Campaign. He was a life member of the Creche and Kindergarten Association, the Royal Geographic Society of Australia, the Returned Soldiers League, honorary member of Rotary, a fellow of the Eugenics Society of Great Britain and a patron of the Spelling Reform Society. In the 1930s with Drs Bostock and Duhig he initiated Queensland Dress Reform Society and later the same group founded the Liquor Reform Society whose credo was "alcohol in moderation and only with meals". He encouraged garden clubs and gave many trophies which are still keenly contested. He also endowed prizes for graduating nurses, determined not on examination alone but for their humanity towards patients. With Dr Bostock he presented the Goodwill Cup to the Royal Queensland Yacht Club (now Squadron) for which there is still keen competition.

Although he continued in medical practice until his death most of his time was spent researching and writing philosophical books and corresponding with like-minded friends. He wrote prolifically on social problems, both local and worldwide. In 1934, with John Bostock, he wrote Whither Away and followed it in 1939 with The Way Out. Also during that period they wrote a series of twelve educational booklets titled The International Knowledge of Living. In 1968 he wrote Man the Fool which sold four editions, and in the following years came Escape to Elysium, Elyium Attained, Eureka, We Have Found It and Towards the Light – a Physician's Search for God. He was often described as a true biologist and this was exemplified by his refusing life prolonging surgery when he was eighty, and finally emphasized by his taking barbiturates while suffering a heart attack. He considered, as did his family and friends, that he died honourably.