David Woodhead passed the primary FRCS while a student at King's College Hospital and the final in 1949 but decided, after an appointment as demonstrator in anatomy at St Bartholomew's Hospital, on general practice as a career, conducting this in Weymouth from 1951 to 1971. While there he studied Russian by correspondence course and by listening to Radio Moscow. With this skill he was appointed medical officer to the British Embassy in Moscow, where he remained for four and a half years. Subsequently he spent two years in Warsaw and four in the United Arab Emirates. Apart from Russian, he was interested in photography, astronomy (he was a member of the Royal Astronomical Society) and was a bibliophile, collecting a large library in English, French and Russian. He also had an exhaustive knowledge of the life of Napoleon Bonaparte. He died of septicaemia on 15 February 1996, survived by his wife, Patricia, a daughter who became a nurse and two grandsons who were both medical students at the time of his death. His son predeceased him.