Nigel Richard Saunders was a consultant cardiothoracic surgeon in Leeds. He was born in Brighton on 22 January 1946, the son of Donald Allan Garner Saunders, a bank manager, and Joan Cathleen Mary Snelling. He was educated at Reigate Grammar School and Hurstpierpoint College, from which he won a Smythe exhibition to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and then went with an entrance exhibition to St Thomas's. He did house jobs at St Thomas's and St James's, Balham, was senior house officer at the Royal Portsmouth Hospital, and became surgical registrar at Bury St Edmunds. He trained in cardiothoracic surgery in Leeds and Sheffield, and then spent a year doing research in Toronto studying lung transplantation, extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, and complement activation in acute lung injury. He was appointed as a consultant surgeon in Leeds. He was a member of the specialist advisory committee on cardiothoracic training. He married Linda Anne Whale in 1969, by whom he had three sons, Richard, David and Mark. He died on 24 January 1998 of metastatic melanoma.