David Hamilton was a surgeon whose major interest became surgery for congenital heart defects. He built up an outstanding department at the Royal Liverpool Children's Hospital and was the foundation professor of cardiac surgery at Edinburgh. He was born on 22 June 1931 to John Alexander King Hamilton (known as Jack) and Helen Eliza Bruce Hamilton née Kirk, and spent his early years in Middlesbrough. His father, a Quaker, had served as a noncombatant ambulance driver for the French Red Cross during the First World War and was awarded a George medal for defusing an unexploded bomb. He later worked as a civil engineer specialising in bridge building. David's mother, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, was a 'child of the manse' who trained as a nurse in Edinburgh. During the construction of Wandsworth bridge, the family moved to London, where they lived in Wimbledon. David went to King's College Junior School and then Leighton Park School (a Quaker school) in Reading. He developed a major interest in sport and became an enthusiastic rugby player, also playing cricket and tennis - and later golf. He was a member of the first XI cricket team at Leighton Park for four years, being a fine batsman and an excellent slip fielder. He played in an English schools rugby XV against a French schools' team in 1949. During National Service, he played rugby for the Royal Corps of Signals. While still at school he befriended Myra McAra, the daughter of the minister of the Presbyterian church in Wimbledon (also a 'child of the manse'). Their first date was for a game of golf. They married after he completed his studies at the Middlesex Hospital in 1957 and both died, in the same nursing home, in 2017 after almost 60 years of marriage. After National Service, he went to the Middlesex Hospital Medical School. In this pre-ultrasound and sophisticated imaging era, he acquired a sound basis of clinical skills. He had decided on a career in surgery as it would allow him to use the manual skills that he had learned during childhood from his father, an expert handyman. He therefore became an anatomy demonstrator and took his primary FRCS, passing at the first attempt, and went on to pass the final FRCS (again at the first attempt) in 1961. His early surgical experience included a rotation with Sir Thomas Holmes Sellors, which aroused his interest in cardiothoracic surgery. Sir Thomas tempted him to continue in that area of surgery and he went on to a term at Harefield Hospital, before applying for a senior registrar position in Liverpool, which started in 1965. Overseas training from 1966 to 1967 took him to California, to the Presbyterian Medical Center, San Francisco, with Frank Gerbode. Soon after returning to Liverpool in 1968, he was appointed to a newly-created full-time consultant post at Broadgreen Hospital. This appointment gave him the opportunity to expand his work into surgery for congenital heart disease at the Royal Liverpool Children's Hospital, Myrtle Street. This work was greatly aided by Gordon Jackson (Jack) Rees and the anaesthetic team, and achieved a national and international reputation, supported further by anatomical studies of congenitally malformed hearts by Bob Anderson, Jim Wilkinson and others in the Institute of Child Health at Alder Hey Hospital. David had been the inspiration for these now famous anatomical studies, having encouraged Bob Anderson to examine the conducting tissue in the heart of a child who had died after developing heart block, following surgery for an atrioventricular septal defect. His research activities, while in San Francisco, had involved tissue valves, and he developed a major interest in the use of homograft and heterograft valves. He visited Green Lane Hospital in Auckland in 1969 and was impressed by the work that was being performed by the team under Brian (later Sir Brian) Barratt-Boyes with deep hypothermic circulatory arrest. With Jackson Rees, he developed a technique of core cooling, which became the standard practice for deep hypothermia in Liverpool and in many other centres, rather than the surface cooling, which had been developed in Auckland in the 1960's. His time in Liverpool saw the arrival of prostaglandin as a means of palliation for sick infants with critical coronary heart disease and the introduction of two-dimensional echocardiography. Both of these changes brought a huge change to the management and outcomes for affected infants. The introduction of prostaglandin E to initial treatment was, he said, the basis of a substantial reduction in his golf handicap, as the need for emergency surgical intervention was greatly reduced! David inspired and guided many trainees from home and abroad, especially from Poland, where he developed a strong link, travelling thither on many occasions over about 15 years from the late 70's and throughout the 1980's. In 1986, David was appointed to the foundation chair of cardiac surgery in Edinburgh. He continued in that position until his retirement in 1993. He was president of the Society of Cardiothoracic Surgeons of Great Britain and Ireland in 1993. David was a skillful surgeon and an excellent teacher. He was gentle, unassuming, modest, self-disciplined and inspired by the Quaker values of strength without aggression and gentleness without weakness. His main leisure activities during retirement involved music (always a passion) and golf, which he continued to play until nearly 80. In his later years he became increasingly incapacitated by Parkinson's disease. David died on 6 October 2017 at the age of 86. He and Myra were survived by their sons James, Alastair and Ross. Their first son, Ian, predeceased them in 2016.