Shirish Bhansali was a consultant surgeon in Bombay, India. He was born on 21 September 1929 in Bombay into a medical family. His father was Kanchanlal Bhansali, a general practitioner, and his uncle was a gynaecologist. His mother was Kumud Vakil. He was educated at the Modern School and Elphinstone College, Bombay, from which he won a merit scholarship to the Royal Institute of Science, Bombay, in 1947. His medical education was at the King Edward VII Memorial Hospital and the Seth Gordhandas Sunderdas Medical College, where he won several distinctions and prizes, culminating in the K N Bahadurji scholarship for surgery in 1952 and the G W Kane gold medal in surgery the following year. He completed house posts in general surgery, orthopaedics and ENT at the King Edward VII Memorial Hospital and held house surgeon and registrar appointments at the Tata Memorial Hospital, gaining his MS in 1957. He then went to England, where he passed the FRCS and became a registrar at the Royal Marsden Hospital, where he was much influenced by Michael Harmer and David Wallace. In 1960, he returned to Bombay as an assistant surgeon at the Tata Memorial Hospital and two years later was appointed honorary surgeon at the Bhatia General Hospital. He was also an honorary assistant professor of surgery at the Topiwala National Medical College, the B Y L Nair Charitable Hospital and the Sir Hurkisondas Nurrottumdas Hospital from 1966 to 1977. In 1980 he became director of the department of general and gastrointestinal surgery at Jaslok Hospital and research centre and consultant surgeon at Breach Candy Hospital. He was a truly general surgeon. Although his special interests were in hepato-pancreo-biliary surgery, he included oncology, critical care and endocrine surgery and wrote a monograph on the surgery of the thyroid. His extensive publications included text books for students on surgery and medicine, minimal access surgery and acute pancreatitis. His early publications were on cancer of the buccal cavity, and he went on to write on the feasibility of resecting primary tumours of the liver and the treatment of cancer of the oesophagus and bladder. His interest was not confined to malignant disease: he published a very large series of cases of tuberculosis of the colon and the surgical complications of typhoid fever, based on his remarkable experience of these conditions, now so rare in the West. He contributed a number of chapters to Vakil’s *Medicine for postgraduate students* and the *Indian year book of medical science*. Bhansali was in demand as a visiting professor and as a moderator in international symposia on oncology and colorectal surgery. In 1970 the Danish government awarded him a fellowship to attend the World Congress of Gastroenterology in Copenhagen. A popular teacher, his students voted him best teacher in 2006 and his colleagues awarded him the Shushrut award in 2008 for excellence in surgery. He was a member of many prestigious surgical associations, both in India and overseas. His outside interests included the Rotary Club of Bombay, of which he was charter president, the Bombay Presidency Radio Club and the Willingdon Sports Club. In 1957 Bhansali married Shanta Borkar, also a doctor, who came from a longstanding medical family. He died on 27 April 2009, leaving his wife and two sons, Uday and Ameet. Uday is a chartered accountant and Ameet an engineer, working in California.