Geoffrey Gibson Bisley was an ophthalmic surgeon who spent much of his career overseas. He was born on 23 May 1915 at Hove, Sussex, the second child of Claude and Ida Gibson. His father was an auctioneer and surveyor in the family business. His maternal grandfather and uncle were both qualified pharmaceutical chemists and his elder sister qualified at the Royal Free Hospital in 1936 and practised as a general practitioner in Maidenhead for about 30 years. Geoffrey attended King’s College School, Wimbledon, and then King’s College Hospital, qualifying in 1940. After a house job in Leatherhead, he joined the RAF in September 1940 and served until March 1946, being overseas in Aden, Palestine and Cyprus. After leaving the RAF, he spent his medical life overseas, initially in Kenya (from 1946 to 1979), working in the Colonial Medical Service until 1963, and then in the Kenyan Ministry of Health. He then worked as warden and chief surgeon at St John’s Hospital, Jerusalem, for two periods, from 1970 to 1983 and 1989 to 1990. The intervening years were spent as ophthalmic surgeon to the government of the Seychelles (1984 to 1985) and to the charity Sightsavers, based in Sierra Leone (from 1987 to 1989). He lectured about prevention and treatment of blindness in Kenya at the Ophthalmological Society of the UK conference in Dublin in 1964 and wrote *A handbook of opththalmology for developing countries* (London, Oxford University Press, 1973), which was well received, with reprints and a second edition. He edited the *East African Medical Journal* (from 1976 to 1979) and was an external examiner in Uganda in medical ophthalmology. He was founder and first president of the Ophthalmological Society of East Africa, a member of the Ophthalmological Society of the UK and a fellow of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine for more than 50 years. He enjoyed gardening, walking, bird-watching and working with wood. He was a religious man, a reader in the Anglican Church in Nairobi and the Church of England, UK. In 1941 he married Joyce Goodwin, a nurse at King’s College Hospital. They had two children – Richard David, born in 1951, who is the senior partner in an insurance company, and John Geoffrey, born in 1954 and founder and director of a safari company in Nairobi. His wife died of cancer in 1986. He died in Nairobi in November 2007.