Wilfred Carlisle Barber was born at Manchester on 2 June 1907. His father was a medical practitioner who graduated MB ChB in Edinburgh in 1899. Barber was educated at Hulme Grammar School, Manchester, and Sutton Valence School, obtaining a leaving exhibition to St John's College, Cambridge. After gaining second class honours in the Natural Sciences Tripos he went on to Manchester University Medical School. His early training in Manchester was with A H Burgess and Wilson Hay, and later at the Middlesex Hospital where he was surgical registrar to Sampson Handley and Turner Warwick. He was a territorial officer in the Royal Army Medical Corps from 1932 and served with distinction in the United Kingdom and East Africa, attaining the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel, as a surgical specialist in charge of a surgical division and officer in charge of a hospital. He was Professor of Surgery at the Royal Faculty of Medicine, Baghdad, from 1946 to 1949. From 1949 he was civilian consultant to HM forces in Kenya. In 1954 he became honorary consultant to the Kenyatta National Hospital and in 1967 its director. He was Chairman of the Kenya Hospital Association from 1965 to 1967, and was a past President of the Association of Surgeons of East Africa, as well as a member of the editorial panel of the *East African medical journal*. Outside medicine, his main interests were reading history and biography, swimming and gardening. He was twice married and had one son, who became MB BCh Cambridge and FRCPC and one daughter, SRN at the Middlesex Hospital. He died after a long illness on 1 August 1975.