John de Beaux spent much of his career working in the Colonial Medical Service, and then worked in Elgin, Scotland, as a consultant surgeon. He was born in Amritsar, India, on 3 December 1921, into an old Anglo-Indian family with many connections in the Colonial Service. His father, Louis Dudley de Beaux, served in the Indian Army through the First World War, retired in 1924 to join the Indian Police and in 1929 started his own business in books and stationery. His mother was Alice Maud Taylor. John de Beaux was educated at the Lawrence Royal Military Schools in Sanawar, from which he matriculated, and Ghora Gali, from which he took an intermediate science degree. He studied medicine at Madras Medical College from 1940 to 1945. After qualifying, he completed house surgeon and casualty officer posts at the Irwin Hospital, New Delhi, before going to England to specialise in surgery, beginning with registrar posts at the Winford Orthopaedic Hospital, Bristol, and the Mount Gold Orthopaedic Hospital, Plymouth. In 1948 he followed his family tradition, at first in the former Italian colonies in Africa, including Eritrea and Somalia, which were under the Foreign Office, and later in the Colonial Service in the British Solomon Islands from 1952 to 1957 (from which he published a paper on yaws). From 1957 to 1967 he was in Fiji, where for the last seven years he was the senior consultant surgeon. Largely influenced by the need to educate his children, he returned to the UK in 1967 as a consultant surgeon to Dr Gray’s Hospital, Elgin. There he remained until he retired in 1986. Dr Gray had founded his hospital in his native Elgin with a fortune made in India under the East India Company. John married Patricia Frieda Bateman, a farmer’s daughter, in 1952. They had two daughters (Patricia Anne and Jane Verina) and two sons (Samuel John and Andrew Charles). Andrew is a surgeon. John counted fishing, gardening, squash and hill-walking among his hobbies. He died of carcinoma of the prostate on 31 January 2008.