Ernest Reginald Frizelle, affectionately known to many as 'Friz', was born on 24 October 1900, exactly 100 days before the death of Queen Victoria. He was the eldest son of Thomas and Minnie Frizelle of Holywood, County Down. He was educated at Sullivan Lower and Upper Schools, Queen's University, Belfast, and the Royal College of Surgeons, Edinburgh. His father was manager of the local gas works and twice president of the Irish Association of Gas Engineers. Friz first experienced surgery from the patient's point of view, when as a boy he had an appendicectomy performed on the kitchen table. He entered medical school in Belfast just short of his 17th birthday and qualified in 1922, at the age of 22. After house appointments in Great Yarmouth, Norwich, Sheffield and Leicester, he obtained the FRCS Edinburgh in 1926, by which time he had performed over 1,000 operations. He was a true general surgeon who was prepared to tackle almost any operation. In his early days he would often perform 30 tonsillectomies in a morning and allow the children to return home by bus in the afternoon. He also included classical caesarian sections in his wide surgical repertoire. He was appointed as an honorary assistant surgeon to Southport General Infirmary in 1929 and honorary assistant surgeon at Leicester Royal Infirmary in 1933, being promoted to full honorary surgeon in 1940. Leicester was his spiritual surgical home and he thrived in its ambience - he became widely known for his acumen and judgement, and his surgical dexterity was legendary. He also had a warm and gracious bedside manner, combined with an ongoing interest in his patients' well-being and an astonishing facility for recalling detail. He had a fund of anecdotes based on his 40 years experience as a surgeon, and one of these described the occasion when he was called out to see a farmer's wife who had a severe haematemesis. Nothing daunted, Friz put the patient into the sidecar of his motorcycle, took her into the Royal Infirmary, and performed a gastrectomy, from which she made a full recovery! Among a distinguished surgical staff, he was the star, and in the middle years of the 20th century Leicester Royal Infirmary became a Mecca for many young surgeons in training; at this time it was reputed that you had to have a primary FRCS to obtain a house surgeon's job. Such was his reputation that in 1957 Friz was elected to the prestigious Moynihan Chirurgical Club, its only member at that time on the staff of a non-teaching hospital. Although he remained in England, his affection for Northern Ireland never waned, and he kept in close touch with its affairs, assuming the presidency of the Leicester Ulster Society in 1962. He revisited Ulster frequently, right up to his 96th year. In 1965, he retired as senior surgeon and was granted the title surgeon emeritus to the Royal Infirmary. Service in this hospital had become his life's work, and he wanted to prepare a short history for its bicentenary in 1971. This later grew into the extensive and definitive *Life and times of the Royal Infirmary at Leicester: the makings of a teaching hospital 1766-1980* (Leicester, Royal Infirmary, 1988). This took nearly 25 years of research, ran to over 620 pages and weighed three kilos. To trace the growth of this provincial hospital over two centuries was to trace the social history of the whole area, a task that fitted well with Frizelle's interdisciplinary skills. It was in recognition of this unique and authoritative work that the De Montfort University, Leicester, conferred an honorary DSc on him in 1995. Friz taught himself word processing at the age of 90, and would voluntarily type manuscripts for publication. He was assiduous in his accuracy and unbending in the high quality of grammar and syntax. Given his own lucid thinking, his wide general knowledge, and his felicity of expression, he could not resist editing as he went, for substance and for style. He continued to work on scripts until a matter of weeks before he died. He was pleased to serve on several professional committees, and was President of the Leicester Medical Society, the Leicestershire and Rutland branch of the BMA, and the Rotary Club. In 1996, he was awarded the Paul Harris fellowship, the highest international award for Rotarians. He networked widely through the BMA of which he became a fellow in 1958, and served on its consultants and specialists division. In 1933 he married Muriel Jamie, daughter of a general practitioner in Coalville, Leicestershire. They had one daughter, Mary, and a granddaughter, Fiona. He died on 29 August 1997.