Edward Mervyn Evans was a former consultant orthopaedic surgeon in Swansea. Born on 13 February 1913, his father was Edward Evans and his mother, Katherine. His life was moulded by a series of unforeseen events. The first was his arrival, six years after the youngest of his three sisters, and 17 years after the oldest. He grew up in a large house in Ealing next to a huge orchard of Cox's apples extending all the way to Chiswick. He was educated at Uppingham, from which he won a classics scholarship to King's College, Cambridge. The sudden death of his father from pneumonia freed him from the pressure of following his father's wishes for him to have an academic career, and he switched to medicine, which was of increasing interest to him. He trained at the Middlesex Hospital, qualifying in 1937. When war broke out he applied initially to work in the Blood Transfusion service, but there were no vacancies, so he joined the surgical team as registrar at the Middlesex under David Patey, finding himself by chance one of the three surgeons working through every night on victims of the blitz, the other two being Oliver Mansfield and Rodney (later Lord) Smith. There was no direct senior supervision and it was truly a massive self-taught lesson in the management of major trauma. He next moved to Hatfield, to take part in the preparation of a surgical hospital due to be shipped out to Burma, and was subsequently drafted to Burma to set it up. During the journey round the Cape he was diverted to the Middle East once it was known Singapore had fallen. After the war he returned to complete his orthopaedic training at the Middlesex, spent time acquiring plastic surgical skills from Rainsford Mowlem, and was appointed consultant orthopaedic surgeon to the Birmingham Accident Hospital, working with William Gissane, Peter Essex-Lopresti and C C Jeffries. In 1950 he was appointed to be one of the only two orthopaedic surgeons west of Cardiff, based in the Morriston Hospital, Swansea, where he stayed for the rest of his working life. He made some significant contributions throughout his career, with notable papers that are still quoted on hand injuries (he was one of the first to introduce plastic surgical techniques into their management), and fractures of the forearm, including important experimental work demonstrating the mechanism of Monteggia's fracture. He received the Robert Jones gold medal in 1949 for an essay entitled 'Pronation and supination: the importance of the rotation element in treatment of injuries of the forearm'. He also gave a Hunterian lecture on the subject, and wrote on trochanteric fractures and a method of treatment of chronic osteomyelitis by direct split skin grafting. Latterly, he was co-author of the first description of particulate fragment sensitivity due to chrome-cobalt in total hip replacement. He was a member of the editorial board of the *Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery* during the editorship of Sir Reginald Watson-Jones. When he died, 25 years after his retirement, nurses with whom he had worked wrote to express the affection with which they still remembered him. He married Muriel Amison in 1938, who died one week before he did. They had two children, a daughter and a son, David, who became a plastic surgeon. He died on 23 December 2000.