Dhulipala Kameswara Rao was born in Andhra Pradesh, South India, on 18 August 1905, the son of a lawyer. He was educated locally until he entered the Madras Medical College, from which he graduated MB BS in 1930. He was a junior house officer at the Government General Hospital and at the Government Maternity Hospital Madras, and obtained the diploma in gynaecology and obstetrics in 1932. He then worked for four years in general practice in 1936 came to Britain to obtain higher qualifications. He passed the FRCS Edinburgh in 1938 and then settled down for the rest of his working life in the Birmingham district. Rao was first a house surgeon at the Birmingham Ear and Throat Hospital in 1938-9, and then in 1940 he went to the Birmingham and Midland Eye Hospital as house surgeon, and, in 1941, resident surgical officer. From 1942 onwards, for the rest of his career, he worked there as senior hospital medical officer and clinical assistant. Ophthalmology thus became his principal interest and he obtained the FRFPS Glasgow in 1950, and the Diploma in Ophthalmology in 1951. From 1956 he was also ophthalmic clinical assistant at the West Bromwich and District Hospital, and SHMO at the Birmingham Children's Hospital from 1960. As the years passed his interest in ophthalmology deepened, and it became his ambition to obtain the Fellowship in ophthalmology. After many failures in the examination during the 1960's he ultimately succeeded in 1971. Rao was married in 1923 and had a son and two daughters of whom the younger took up medicine and became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, and worked as an anaesthetist in Southport. He left his family in India when he first came to Britain. He died at the age of 67 on 9 July 1973, in Birmingham.