Born on 8 February 1891 in the Military Cantonments at Bangalore, Dick Rishworth was the son of an officer in the British Army in India: his mother was the daughter of a major in the Indian Army Ordnance Corps and his great grandfather was an Assistant Surgeon of the East India Company. After education at schools in Bangalore and Rangoon he received his medical education at Madras Medical College where he won the Johnstone and Blacklock Gold Medals. Like so many men born in the Colonies or Dominions his career was largely devoted to service in the British Empire. In 1914 he was commissioned in the Indian Medical Service and worked mainly on hospital ships in the Persian Gulf, the Dardanelles and Eastern Mediterranean: he was present at the evacuation of the British from Ismid on the advance of Kemal Ataturk. After demobilisation in 1921 he spent two years as a house surgeon at Charing Cross Hospital (acting also as divisional surgeon to Scotland Yard). In 1923 he returned to India and spent the next twenty years first as District Medical Officer and then Principal Medical and Health Officer to the Great Indian Peninsula Railway. While he was in Jhansi he was the first to introduce blood transfusion into the area; later when he moved to Bombay he was secretary in West India of the St John Ambulance Association and formed a division of over 1000 people trained in first aid and with its own ambulance. Rishworth returned to England in 1946, but was asked by the Foreign Office to go to Baghdad as director of the medical service of the Iraq State Railways. Subsequently the Nigerian government asked him to report on the medical service of its railways: he travelled Nigeria's entire railway system before writing a book in 1955 which was described in a review as the classic work on the subject of railway medical services in developing countries. He continued as medical adviser to the Nigerian Railways until he retired at the age of 96. In his years overseas he was a notable sportsman, enjoying particularly tiger shooting, pig sticking and fly fishing. In retirement and following the death of his wife he became a prolific painter, in both water colour and oil, and a sculptor. He married in 1918 Elizabeth Dawson Moray who died in 1966 and his elder son was killed in 1941. In his later years he lived in a small flat in Putney where he always welcomed friends with a delightful fund of memories and anecdotes of India. On first acquaintance he appeared somewhat formal, but his twinkling eyes and charming humour soon led to cups of tea and an exhibition of his latest paintings, of which he was justly very proud. He lived alone at Putney until he was 96 and died in a nursing home six days after his hundredth birthday. He bequeathed £50,000 to the College for the improvement of the *Annals*, and in 1987 gave a bronze statuette by WH Rheinhold of an ape contemplating a human skull while sitting on a pile of books, one of which is labelled *Darwin*, and another is open and bears the words *Eritis sicut Deus*.