Yahya Cohen was senior surgeon at the Singapore General Hospital and a former president of the Singapore Medical Council. Born in Singapore on 1 April 1920, he was the son of Menahem Cohen, a Yemeni merchant and Mozelle née Ezra who was from Iraq. The eldest of their three children, he was the only son. When he was eight or nine years old, his father had to have an operation and he later wrote that visiting him in hospital inspired his commitment to surgery. In Singapore, he was educated at Raffles Girls’ School, St Andrew’s School and Raffles College before attending the King Edward VII College of Medicine in 1938 where John Kirkpatrick Monro was professor of surgery. His medical education was interrupted by the Japanese occupation of Singapore from 1942 to 1945. As Jews they were interned in Changi jail (as was John Monro) and Cohen’s parents died on a boat to Kuching which was bombed, possibly by the Americans. He recalled that he lost a lot of Chinese friends and classmates who were decapitated by the Japanese. He graduated in 1947 and, the following year, continued his studies in the UK with a Queen’s scholarship covering general and plastic surgery in Edinburgh, Oxford and London. Surgeons he worked with at this time included Ian Aird, Maurice Ewing and Thomas Pomfret Kilner. He passed the fellowship in 1952. On his return to Singapore he became lecturer and then senior lecturer in surgery at the University of Malaya from 1950 to 1959 and, ten years later, became professor of surgery retiring from that post in 1977. In 1960 he was appointed senior surgeon to the Singapore General Hospital, a post he held until 1972. During his career he carried out many distinguished roles. He was a founder member of the Academy of Medicine, Singapore, its first scribe in 1957 and master from 1968 to 1970. President of the Singapore Medical Association from 1961 to 1962, he was also president of the Singapore Medical Council in 1972 and served on the boards of numerous other medical bodies and Jewish charities. He contributed widely to the medical literature and was renowned for his conscientious patient care, happy to be disturbed in the night or at weekends if necessary. In 1965, while he was visiting professor and head of the surgical unit in Tel Aviv, he met Janina Sophie (Nina) Horowitz, an engineer, at a dinner party. He proposed almost immediately as he was due to return to Singapore in three weeks’ time and they were married the following year. After he retired the Singapore Association of Plastic Surgeons awarded him an honorary membership in 1993, this was an honour normally reserved for distinguished international plastic surgeons. The Chapter of Surgeons of the Academy of Medicine (which he founded in 1966) also honoured him by inaugurating an annual Yahya Cohen lecture in 1996. He died on 25 February 2003, survived by his wife.