Douglas George Arnott Eadie was a consultant surgeon at the London Hospital. He was born on 16 June 1931, the son of Herbert Arnott Eadie, a general practitioner in Leeds, and Hannah Sophia née Wingate. His father died when Douglas was a year old and he was brought up by his step-father, Sir Raymond (later Lord) Hinchcliffe, the celebrated lawyer and Master of the Rolls. Douglas was educated at Epsom College and did his first MB at Queen Mary College, en route to the London Hospital Medical College. An outstanding cricketer and dashing fly-half, he was an ebullient and popular student. He qualified in 1955 and was house physician to Sir Russell (later Lord) Brain and John (later Sir) Ellis, whose confidential reports were as glowing as those of his surgical chiefs - Alan Perry and Gerald Tresidder. He decided early on to follow a surgical career and took a short service commission in the RAMC, where he served in Singapore and Hong Kong as a junior specialist in surgery and incidentally found time to play cricket for the Army. He returned to the London to study for the FRCS, which he passed in 1962. By now his direct and friendly approach to patients and his unusually elegant style of operating had attracted the notice of his peers, among them Hermon Taylor, who was then pioneering vascular surgery at the London. In 1962 he won the Hugh Robertson exchange fellowship to Presbyterian St Luke's Hospital in Chicago, where the department of vascular surgery set up by Geza de Takats could by then boast the triple stars of Julian, Dye and Javid, pioneers of aortic reconstruction and peripheral vascular surgery. This was a turning point in his career: he was impressed by the challenge of this difficult and dangerous speciality - so unforgiving of technical error, and so rewarding to manual skill. After his return to the London Hospital, he was appointed senior registrar to the general surgical firm of Richardson and Blandy. In 1967 he was recruited by David Ritchie as senior lecturer on the surgical unit and given consultant status the following year. His research into transplantation of the thyroid shed light on the enigma of Riedel's thyroiditis and gained the MS in 1969, but his first interests were unashamedly the clinical care of patients. He was appointed to the staff of the London later the same year. Thereafter, while Eadie continued to develop new techniques in vascular surgery, his colleagues continued to refer to him the whole range of general surgery. With his energy, and his direct and kind way with patients, it was inevitable that he would be successful in Harley Street; and like so many of those who work hard in their private practice, he worked even harder for the NHS. He was a popular teacher, and a role model to his juniors, many of whom used his methods to set up first-rate departments of vascular surgery all over the British Isles. Although he published extensively on vascular surgery and surgery of the thyroid, his colleagues knew him best as a painstaking and careful surgeon for whom the patient always came first. It was not long before he was appointed to the honorary staff of King Edward VII, the Royal Masonic, and Osborne House. Influenced by his step-father, he developed an interest in medico-legal matters, and became a highly respected expert witness. He was Chairman of the council and later treasurer of the Medical Protection Society; served on the General Medical Council for five years from 1983, and was master of the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries in 1990. He married in 1957 Gillian Carlyon Coates, by whom he had two sons, James and Simon, and two daughters, Victoria and Lucy. Dogged by arteriosclerosis, he suffered a series of heart attacks and underwent open heart surgery, but always bounced back in fine fettle. He was acting as ball boy to a grandson when his last and fatal heart attack took place on holiday in the Bahamas on 5 December 2000. He is survived by his wife, children and five grandchildren.