Henry Nightingale was born in Kingston on Thames on 21 April 1880. His father, James, was a surveyor and his mother before marriage was Agnes Thrupp. He went to school at Kingston Grammar School from where he obtained a scholarship to King's College, London. Nightingale next gained a scholarship to St Thomas's Hospital, where he had a distinguished record as a student, qualifying in 1906. He was appointed to various resident posts at St Thomas's and then moved to Southampton as a general practitioner, although his chief interest was of course surgery. In 1913 he was appointed to the staff of the Royal South Hants Hospital, first as a physician, a post he held until the outbreak of war in 1914. In 1915 he joined the RAMC as a surgeon and throughout the war served in France and during that time he gained a great experience in a variety of war wounds. This experience he later wrote up in a classic article in the *Lancet* (1944, 1, 525). He was a pioneer in the operative treatment of wounds of the abdomen and was one of the first surgeons in this country to realise that fulminating fatal gas gangrene is nearly always associated with the interference to the main blood supply to the limb. Many of the lessons he recognised and taught had to be relearned all over again at the time of the second world war. After the war he returned to his general practice together with his duties at the hospital, but gave up general practice in 1933 in favour of consulting surgery. Between the wars he was surgeon to the Southampton Borough Hospital, the Free Eye Hospital and Knowle Hospital as well as being consultant to the Royal Mail and Union Castle Lines. Nightingale was for a time chairman of the Royal South Hants Management Committee as well as being actively engaged in all the affairs of the other hospitals to which he was attached. In 1938 he was Chairman of the local division of the BMA and from 1941-55 he served as magistrate on the Southampton City Branch. During the second world war he stayed in Southampton and was responsible for the treatment of many air raid casualties as well as those wounded evacuated from France; for his services during this period he was awarded the OBE. In 1945 he retired and lived a full and active life from his home in Lymington until his death. Nightingale was loved and respected by all his colleagues and he had an unrivalled experience of the treatment of war wounds and any who are interested in this subject should not fail to read his article in the *Lancet* on this subject. In 1909 he married Kathleen Barber and had a supremely happy marriage. There were no children. Nightingale died quietly at the age of 93 on 27 May 1973.