Michael Reilly was born in Sheringham, Norfolk, on 30 August 1913, several weeks post-mature. This procrastination was to be a feature of his life. There was a suggestion that he should be christened 'Fabius', after the great Roman general Fabius Maximus Cunctator, but he was saddled with the family name of 'Tempest' instead, which was the cause of much later embarrassment. He was the third child of six, and the elder of two sons. His father was Hugh Tempest Reilly, a former Oxford history scholar, his mother, Margery née Dunthorne. They were on leave from India when Michael was born, and, at the age of three weeks, he accompanied them back to the subcontinent, a return he had delayed. He spent his childhood in India and learned to love the country both his father and mother served. Most of his friends were the children of members of the Indian staff, with whom he chattered in Tamil. After returning to England in 1919 at the end of the first world war, he spent a year in the care of various relatives and at a small residential school run for children whose parents, like his, worked abroad. During this time he developed sentiments towards aunts akin to those of Saki. In 1921, he went to Amesbury, a preparatory boarding school run by a genius of a schoolmaster, C L Macdonald DSO. There he received the broadest possible grounding, and found to his surprise and delight that he was considered reasonably intelligent. From there he took an open scholarship to Haileybury in 1927. The scholarship papers included Latin and Greek, so inevitably for those days he was put on the classical side, in spite of expressing a preference for mathematics and a desire eventually to take up medicine. He got some minor satisfaction from later gaining higher marks in school certificate mathematics than anyone on the maths side. He won prizes in Latin, Greek and English literature, before eventually being allowed to switch to pre-medical subjects at the age of 18. He spent most of his time at Haileybury in idleness and misery, and attributed any academic success he had there to his preparatory school training. The main lesson he learned was how to survive. From Haileybury he went to St Mary's Hospital Medical School in 1932 with an entrance scholarship. These scholarships were widely believed by other hospitals to be awarded for athletic prowess, at rugby football in particular. Reilly was no athlete, except for some ability at swimming and fencing. Ball games baffled him, but he found at St Mary's that he enjoyed rugby football for the first time, among the lower strata. He enjoyed the freedom and camaraderie of medical student life after the brutal and philistine horrors of public school, and pursued his interests in beer, women and bonhomie to the detriment of his medical studies. He just scraped through his second MB exam, and was too exhausted by the effort to sit for the primary FRCS, which at that time it was possible to take before qualification. He enjoyed his clinical studies, and, during his final year, took the post of clinical assistant in the eye department, which also involved some ENT work. Few students then bothered to enter for clinical prizes, but he felt that with his experience he should enter for at least one - the opthalmology prize. This he did, and was relieved to win half of it, the other half going to a dedicated prize-hunter. During his final year, he was also editor of the hospital gazette and continued for another year after qualification. He found the job genial but demanding. In one issue the editorial, the clinical article, the comic article, the sports reports, the book reviews and the fill-ins, appearing with different initials, as well as the cartoons, were all by him. His taste and judgement were not impeccable, and he sometimes verged on the libellous in some of his verse lampoons. It was not until many years later that he learned from Lord Porritt that he had nearly been disciplined for one of his attacks on the Establishment. It was customary in the 1930s to qualify by taking the conjoint examinations one by one and then take a house appointment, before graduating with a degree. In his final year Reilly took pathology, obstetrics and gynaecology, medicine and forensic successively at intervals of three months. To his dismay he failed at the last hurdle, surgery. There was just time to enter for the London University final examination, at that time taken all together. After three weeks concentrated devotion to his books, he succeeded in obtaining his degree, one of only four from St Mary's in that year. He was informed that he had only just failed to obtain honours in medicine. After graduating in May 1937, and taking a temporary post as resident anaesthetist at St James' Hospital, Balham, he was appointed, after written and oral examination of applicants, house surgeon to the surgical unit at St Mary's. In the process he was pleased to come ahead of the candidate with whom he had shared the opthalmology prize. The Professor was Charles Pannet, and the assistant director Arthur Porritt, later Lord Porritt. Pannet was a meticulous surgeon, an accomplished artist and a gifted teacher, not only of surgery but of the central importance of the patient. His example persuaded Reilly, who had always enjoyed exercising dexterity since childhood in model-making, Meccano, knitting and sewing, that in surgery, rather than in medicine, it was possible to use one's hands as well as one's head. He decided to work for his primary FRCS. Meanwhile, he took opportunities to gain as wide an experience as possible in junior medical and surgical posts in London and the provinces. When the second world war broke out, his natural indolence had prevented him from sitting for further examinations. The outbreak of war was a splendid excuse to avoid any more academic study, rather than enjoyable practical experience, so he joined the RAF. His incidental ambition to learn to fly received a setback when all but regular medical officers were forbidden to 'take their wings'. He served first at fighter command stations in the UK, then for a year as medical officer on troopships to Suez via the Cape and to the West Indies, then in the United Kingdom again, before being posted to the Far East at the time of D-Day. He was station medical officer in Ceylon for a while, where he enjoyed the respect of the Tamil labour force that also came under his care, not only for studying written and spoken Tamil, but also for being able to eat raw green chillies without apparent discomfort. He then took part in the combined operation to set up an airstrip in the Cocos Keeing Islands to cover the Allied invasion of Malaya. Fortunately, the Japanese were by then in retreat or they would have annihilated the expedition, a classic example of incompetent inter-service planning. After six months as senior RAF medical officer in the Cocos, he returned to Royal Air Force headquarters, Ceylon, on the Japanese surrender, and thence took a ship home for demobilisation. Against all the rules, he managed to disembark at Suez and fly to Cairo. While in England 18 months before, he had become engaged to Joy Petrie, who had given up the opportunity of reading English at Oxford at the beginning of the war to train as a nurse at King's College Hospital. She was serving in the Princess Mary's Royal Air Force Nursing Service, and was then in Cairo. They married in Cairo Anglican Cathedral. An attempt was made shortly afterwards to burn it down, and it was later demolished to make room for road works. After returning to England, Reilly worked at St Mary's for two years as an ex-service registrar, during which time he again studied for the primary FRCS. While shopping with his wife, he met a pre-war girlfriend who asked what he was doing now. On being told that he was working for his primary, the friend replied, somewhat to his late-wedded wife's dismay, "You always were, weren't you?" Having finally surmounted this obstacle at the age of 34, he took his delayed MRCS and then the FRCS, which he failed. On his fourth failure he was told not to come back for a year. He was finally successful at his fifth attempt. By that time he had been resident surgical officer at the Royal Bucks Hospital, Aylesbury and, failing any other appointment, a locum in general practice for three months. After that he drew the dole, until he was appointed as a senior registrar to Chester Royal Infirmary in 1950. He found this a salutary experience. He was expected to be on duty 24 hours a day, seven days a week, during which time he held out-patient sessions, supervised the casualty department, and carried out operating sessions, on 'cold' surgery and all the emergency surgery. During one period of 48 hours, he was operating for 25. He dealt with four perforated peptic ulcers on one Sunday morning and completed his 500th appendicectomy. Towards the end of his time in Chester, he was censured before the full hospital management committee in the presence of a child who had Down's syndrome with pneumonia, for refusing to treat the child surgically. He applied successfully for a post as first assistant at the London Hospital, in spite of a threat from Chester to give an adverse report. He had informed the Chester authorities that if they did so they would hear from his solicitor. He had none at the time. He spent four happy years at the London, where he learned most from George Neligan, Hermon Taylor and Clive Butler. It became apparent to him that he was getting long in the tooth and that if he was to have any chance of a senior surgical appointment he should obtain a further higher surgical qualification. He sat the London MS on the last occasion that the written and oral examination was held, in December 1952, before it was awarded by thesis. The examination took place in South Kensington, during the celebrated smog, and Reilly took five hours to cross London, arriving on the first day with five minutes to spare. He was one of the fortunate few to escape the necessity of producing a thesis. In 1954, after it became apparent that as the oldest and most eccentric senior registrar on the suicide circuit he would never attain his ambition of a consultant post at a London teaching hospital, he applied for various vacancies in the district hospitals, finally being appointed in Plymouth. At the time the nearest centres for thoracic surgery were in Cornwall and near Exeter, while neurosurgery and plastic surgery were centred in Bristol, 120 miles away. There was no whole-time urologist either, so general surgeons were truly general. Junior staff were very junior - there was not even a surgical registrar in Devonport Hospital, where he worked, nor a senior surgical registrar in the whole of Plymouth during the whole of his time there. He had to be available for all surgical emergencies during his time on rota until well over 50 years of age. One of his interests was vascular surgery. He had been working with freeze-dried homografts at the London, and brought some down with him to use in Devonport. When these ran out, he made his own nylon grafts, until prefabricated teflon and dacron grafts became available. In addition to general surgical duties, he carried out all the vascular surgery in Plymouth for some years. Another interest was colon and rectal surgery. He conceived the idea of sigmoid myotomy in 1962 and carried out the first operation that year. This procedure gained some recognition abroad and a mixed reception at home. He found the task of writing papers and checking references without the backing of any department so tedious that he never committed any other ideas to paper, but encouraged his registrars, when he had them, to follow up his work if they were interested. He had views on the value of pre-ganglionic sympathotomy as opposed to sympathectomy, which gained some interest 20 years later. His main pre-occupation was the practise of surgery and the care and comfort of patients. In 1972, he gained some notoriety in the media for his outspoken opposition to the retrospective legislation empowering the General Medical Council to impose an annual retraining fee. As a result of this and other stresses, he was admitted to the intensive care ward early in 1973 with suspected coronary occlusion. Earlier he had been persuaded by his colleagues to stand for election to the Council of the Royal College of Surgeons. While convalescing on sick leave, he learned to his surprise that he had been successful. There was at that time a movement towards a more widely based representation on the Council. He surmised that his good fortune may have been partly due to this, partly that his name was known in medico-political and proctological circles, and partly to votes from the Indian sub-continent. In the absence of UK applicants loath to sever the umbilical cords binding them to their alma maters, Reilly had always had the pick of juniors from overseas, almost every one of whom proceeded to take their FRCS successfully. On arriving in Lincoln's Inn Fields, Reilly expected to have to storm the Establishment in its ivory tower, waving a flaming sword, but found instead a friendly welcome from a remarkably well-informed and dedicated body of men. When a vacancy occurred for a College representative on the General Medical Council, it seemed to the Council that in spite of his previous activities he would be a suitable choice. The poacher turned gamekeeper. He retired in 1978, having reached the age of 65, thanks to the skill of his medical and surgical colleagues. He underwent, in all, 17 surgical operations himself, many of them major, on most parts of the body, except the cranium. It was believed by some that this was a regrettable oversight. He himself believed that his experiences as a patient helped him to help others. In his retirement, he devoted himself to his lifetime pursuit, the enjoyment of idleness, interrupted by sporadic attempts to write his magnum opus. He had four children, Susan, David, Christopher and Timothy, two of them medical. He had the pleasure of introducing his eldest son to the President on the occasion of the FRCS diploma ceremony. His son had passed first time. He died on 3 January 2000. He had indicated that he hoped to live at least until 1 January 2000, in order to have the pedantic pleasure of pointing out to the ignorant that the 21st century would not begin until 1 January 2001.