William Burnett was born on 23 March 1921 and educated at Ballater and Banchory Schools on Deeside, Aberdeenshire. He entered Aberdeen University in 1938 and graduated in medicine with first class honours in 1943. He then spent a year as an assistant with Professor R D Lockhart in the University of Aberdeen department of anatomy as he had decided on a career in surgery. During this time he gained the Hallett Prize in the Primary Fellowship examination of the Royal College of Surgeons. He spent three years until 1948 serving in the RAMC in Germany, Palestine, Egypt and Greece. Returning to Aberdeen he began his surgical training with Professor W C Wilson in the Royal Infirmary and gained the FRCS in 1949. From 1951 to 1956 he held the post of lecturer in surgery in Aberdeen. The award of a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship in 1951 enabled him to spend a year at the University of Minnesota and he carried out research in diseases of the liver and gall bladder, in which he continued to have a special interest. For his thesis on the differential diagnosis of jaundice he was granted the ChM with honours by Aberdeen University. In 1956 Burnett was appointed a consultant surgeon with Professor Sir Charles Illingworth in the university unit of the Western Infirmary, Glasgow, and his interest was stimulated in gastric surgery and he early realised the value of the fibreoptic gastroscope. He became a member of the distinguished group of professors of surgery who owed their chief inspiration to Sir Charles Illingworth. In 1963 William Burnett was appointed Mayne Professor in the University of Queensland, Brisbane, and he built up a large and progressive university department where research was much emphasised. He did much to develop and expand the surgical services there, attracting young surgeons of quality to work with him. He was a skilful writer too, with many publications and the Australasian College owed him much for finally bringing to completion their *Manual of basic sciences in relation to surgery*. William Burnett was essentially a man's man, somewhat diffident and shy in company, though a splendid host. As a young man he was often climbing and hill-walking in the Cairngorms, he loved the hills of Deeside. He had a great interest in music and the arts, and he built up a personal collection of Australian paintings. For a time he was director of the Arts Council of Queensland and President of the Theatre Club in Brisbane. Although an accomplished teacher and researcher, he was the perennial student taking various university courses including French literature, world religions, Oriental languages and only a month before he died he gained a credit in Semitics. He was a most interesting companion with his incisive mind and objectivity apparent in his lively discourse on many and varied subjects. He was unmarried and survived by his sister, Mrs Helen Rimmer, in Brisbane. He died on 30 August 1981 at the age of 60.