Louis Blumberg was a consultant surgeon in Cape Town and a respected medical historian. He was born in 1920 and educated in Cape Town, where he graduated in 1944. He went to England to specialise in surgery, passed the FRCS, and returned to South Africa, developing a private practice in Cape Town and becoming a consultant surgeon and senior lecturer at Groote Schuur and Somerset hospitals, as well as a part-time lecturer in the department of anatomy at the University of Cape Town. He subsequently became an associate professor at the Medical University of Southern Africa and principal surgeon at Ga Rankuwa Hospital. He wrote on a number of general surgical topics, including vascular surgery, the anterior tibial syndrome and traumatic pancreatitis, and produced a popular textbook for students *Introductory tutorials in clinical surgery* (Cape Town, Juta and Co., 1986). In the field of medical history he wrote on the war wounds in Homer’s *Iliad* and the diaries of J B S Greathead. He retired in 1994 to Pretoria, where he continued to pursue his interest in medical history. Towards the end of his life he developed Parkinson’s disease, and died in 2006, leaving his widow Hinda.