João Dos Santos, surgeon to the Santa Maria Hospital, Lisbon, and Professor of Surgery there, was born in Lisbon on August 5, 1907. His father, Reynaldo Dos Santos was also a Lisbon surgeon of international standing and he too was an Honorary FRCS as well as Honorary KBE. After early education in Lisbon, Joao proceeded to medical school and qualified in 1932. In his early surgical training he was profoundly influenced by his father and by Rene Leriche of Strasbourg to whom he was attached for a short time. He also worked with Sir David Wilkie in Edinburgh. Joao was an essentially general surgeon who early developed a lifelong interest in vascular diseases, fired by his father's work on arteriography and his spell with Leriche. As a student he published, with his father, the first anatomical interpretation of aortography and arteriography. His MD thesis included a number of original observations on direct arterial surgery, the use of heparin and on lumbar ganglionectomy. He envisaged resection of the aortic bifurcation for vascular obstruction therein, but was anticipated in the performance of this procedure by his old chief Leriche who did the first such operation just two weeks before him. The development of venography and arteriography by Dos Santos was characterised by great technical skill and expertise, he produced many fine sequential pictures of the peripheral vessels well before the introduction of automatic cassette changes and other developments. João pioneered arterial disobliteration or endarterectomy and he was regularly with the advance guard in research. Notwithstanding his dominant vascular interests he had, like his father, a great interest in urology and was one of the first in Europe to undertake transurethral prostatectomy and the use of the ileal graft in treatment of the contracted bladder. His published work included many papers on venous and arterial thrombosis and embolism; vascular spasm; techniques of venography and arteriography; management of the ischaemic lower limb; the use of vascular patch grafts and endoaneurysmorrhaphy, as well as urological subjects, medical education and hospital administration. He gave many lectures abroad and was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England and of the Edinburgh College; Hunterian Orator and Honorary Fellow of the Hunterian Society of London; Honorary Fellow of the Association of Surgeons of Great Britain and Ireland as well as honorary fellow of a number of surgical and vascular societies. He was also a corresponding member of societies in many countries and received honorary degrees in Dublin, Marseilles and Brazil. He was President of the International Society of Surgery and of the International Cardiovascular Society. Outside the strictly surgical field he served as an independent member of the Portuguese Parliament from 1953 to 1957 with responsibility for medical education and hospital organisation. He was outspoken in his criticism of bureaucracy, as a result of which the Government suspended him from his hospital duties for several months after he committed the 'offence' of writing a critical report on the state of Portuguese hospitals in 1966. This was an event which he always thereafter recorded with his 'prizes' in his curriculum vitae! João Dos Santos had a truly international outlook and a gift for friendship with people of all nations. He was fluent in French and English, and also spoke Spanish and Italian. Apart from his work he had a profound interest in music and was a most accomplished pianist. He had a fine library and was a keen bibliophile, collecting mainly early Portuguese history. He possessed a large collection of pocket watches, of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and he was a member of the Antiquarian Horological Society of London, though he was never a particularly punctual man. His beautiful house in Lisbon was the scene of many gatherings of overseas surgeons and their families. In 1929 he married Maria de Nazare Anjos de Vilhena whose family had notable political and medical connections and is survived by his wife and son, who is a Professor at the Slade School of Art, and three daughters.