David Simpson was a consultant in accident and emergency medicine. He was born in London in 1954 and entered King’s College Hospital for medical training. He had considered a career as an engineer, but changed his mind after early training in this discipline. After gaining his FRCS, he became a surgical registrar at the Westminster Hospital and then settled on a career in accident and emergency medicine. He became an associate member of the British Association of Orthopaedic Surgeons and a member of the British Association for Accident and Emergency Medicine, and his future career seemed assured at a time when the specialty was expanding from the old ‘casualty departments’ to the modern ones capable of dealing with a variety of emergencies. He was very interested and had a great knowledge of ‘Scott of the Antartic’, to whom he was distantly related. On entering the Cambridge/Norwich senior registrar training programme he was described as a likeable and hard working, intelligent trainee, but then he developed health problems which dogged his lifestyle and made it difficult for him to engage in permanent posts. Eventually he went to the Middle East, working mainly in Saudi Arabia, and from thence to New Zealand, where he died suddenly on 14 July 2003. He is survived by Raja, his second wife, and Sue and his children, Duncan and Victoria.