Vaman Raghunath Mirajkar was born on 13 October 1887 in Mangalore where he received his early education, proceeding to the Grant Medical College where he graduated MB BS in the University of Bombay in 1913. He then became house surgeon to Colonel Street, Professor of Surgery in Bombay, and served in the IMS in the first world war. He took the Conjoint Diploma in 1914, ranked as a Lieutenant in France in 1914-15, then in Iraq, as a Captain in 1915-18. He was promoted to Major in 1926, and ultimately attained the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel, IMS. After the first world war he returned to India and was posted to Waziristan on the NW frontier and served there till he was appointed to the military hospital in Bombay in 1922. In 1924 he came to England and a year later obtained the FRCS. On his return to India he continued in the IMS till 1936 when he became Professor of Surgery at the Lahore Medical College, where he continued till he retired in 1946. Afterwards he carried on a private practice in Delhi, but occasionally operated in Bombay and Calcutta also. Mirajkar was an outstanding technical surgeon, and prominent in the profession as a member of the Association of Surgeons of India, presiding over the annual meeting at Mysore in 1945. When he died in 1972 India lost a senior and respected member of the profession who was an outstanding Fellow of the College of Surgeons.