Alan Birt was born on 24 June 1915, the son of the Surgeon Dentist to King George V and Queen Mary. Like his father, he was educated at Wellington College and St Thomas's Hospital, where he qualified with honours in 1937. He held a number of junior appointments there and was later appointed senior registrar, having passed the FRCS in 1940. Some of his early research at this time included work on operative cholangiography. He joined the Royal Army Medical Corps and rose to command 22 Field Surgical Unit during the landings in North Africa of the combined British (First Army) and American forces, serving throughout the Algerian and Tunisian campaigns, until he joined the 8th Army at El Alamein. Early in July 1943, Birt was given a sealed brown parcel 'to be opened only when at sea'. It proved to contain 25 ampoules, each containing 20,000 units of penicillin. His subsequent notes were among the first to document the remarkable powers of this new discovery in treating staphylococcal infections and gas gangrene. In 1946 he was appointed surgeon to the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital, where he became renowned for his enormous capacity for hard work. He did pioneer work in vascular and cardiac surgery, reported the first successful operation for dissecting aneurysm of the aorta in Britain, and operated for septal defects, mitral valve disease and patent ductus arteriosus. He was much concerned with the training of young surgeons, and chaired the advisory committee of the Association of Surgeons, of which he became President in 1979. Birt retired in 1979 and went to live near Loch Fyne, where he enjoyed his hobby of Scottish country dancing. His wife Joyce, whom he had married in 1937, had sadly developed Parkinson's disease, and he looked after her during her last illness. After her death he married Peggy, and they returned to Norwich. He died on 12 August 1993, survived by her, a son and three daughters.