Adam Martin Johns was a consultant trauma and orthopaedic surgeon in Burton upon Trent, Staffordshire. Born on 25 April 1942 in Jerusalem (which was then located in Palestine under the British Mandate), he was the third son of Cedric Norman Johns and his wife Sybil Marian née Linnell. His father was a distinguished archaeologist who spent 20 years working in the Palestinian Mandate Department of Antiquities and his mother was a musician. After primary education in Cheltenham at Dean Close Junior School from 1949 to 1955, he enrolled at St Paul’s School in Hammersmith, London in January 1956 with an entrance scholarship. He wrote that the headmaster of Dean Close, Tony Gilkes, encouraged this move and it was one he never regretted. In the academic year 1960 to 1961 he was captain of the school. Although he had always intended to become a doctor most of his school years he spent studying the classics and won an open scholarship in classics to Emmanuel College Cambridge when he was 18. He then began what he described as *the hard work of the changeover to medicine* and took a gap year to pass physics and chemistry with help from the University of Wales while staying at home in Aberystwyth. He went up to Cambridge in October 1962 at the age of 20. At the time Emmanuel was one of the best sporting colleges and he was able to continue playing rugby and rowing. Completing his tripos in two years he spent his final year reading archaeology and anthropology which he said that he found mentally relaxing. He did his clinical studies at Oxford as there was no clinical school in Cambridge at the time. This was very beneficial as there were few students and plenty of patients. In 1967 he spent his elective period at St John’s Eye Hospital in East Jerusalem. Spending two months there, he found it instructive to experience a range of medical problems that he would not have found in the UK and enjoyed sightseeing. He flew out of Jordan three days before the start of the six-day war. Initial house jobs were at the Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford and then he moved back to Cambridge as demonstrator in anatomy and to prepare for the first part of his FRCS. Having passed this exam he had a few months free and so went to work for Save the Children in southeast Nigeria. Conditions were very grim as the country was suffering from the aftermath of the Biafran War and he ran the paediatric ward in a large mission hospital for four months. On his return he worked initially in Oxford again and passed his final fellowship in 1973. On deciding to specialise in orthopaedics he spent time in Swindon and at St Thomas’s in London, followed by four years in South Wales at Swansea and Cardiff. Appointed consultant in trauma and orthopaedics at Burton District Hospital in Burton-on-Trent in July 1980, he remained there until his retirement in 2002. Having become a consultant when the era of sub-specialisation was just beginning, he developed an interest in wrist and hand surgery and also operated on many patients with rheumatoid arthritis. He developed and led departmental audits at Burton and pioneered outcome studies. During his career he also undertook a certain amount of private and medico-legal work. He was commissioned as captain in the RAMC in 1977 and served for ten years retiring with the rank of major. Several years after retirement he was to write *I really enjoyed working as a surgeon but have left it all behind me since retirement. Did the study of classics really help?It certainly helped me to understand medical terminology and has given me a wide field of interest beyond work which I still enjoy.* While doing house jobs in Oxford he met an attractive staff nurse Mary Lambert and they married on 2 August 1969. They had two daughters; Lucy Anne (born 26 August 1973) who followed her mother into the nursing profession and Helen Mary (born 25 January 1977) who became a scientist. At school and college he excelled at rugby and rowing and all his life he enjoyed various forms of mountaineering, including walking and scrambling. Most of his trips were in Scotland but in the past he had been hutting in the Dolomites and climbing in the Pyrenees. Just before taking up his post at Burton he completed, with a group of friends, the full traverse of the Cuillin ridge on Skye, described as perhaps the toughest mountain day in the UK. An accomplished linguist he spoke five European languages as well as keeping up his knowledge of the classics. He was an enthusiastic choral singer and for most of his life sang as a tenor with two local choral societies, although noted later that he might soon be relegated to the basses. He died on 1 February 2017 aged 74 years, and was survived by his wife and daughters.