Arthur Morris Loughran was born in 1917. He graduated at Edinburgh in 1939 and served in the RAMC during the war, mostly in India, where he became surgical specialist with the rank of Major. After demobilization in 1946, and taking up senior registrar posts first in Oldchurch Hospital and then in the Royal Victoria Infirmary, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where he completed his surgical training, he was appointed consultant surgeon to the West Cumberland Group of Hospitals in 1951. For many years of this appointment, like so many surgeons of that period in peripheral hospitals, he bore a heavy work load. He shared all elective and emergency work with only one other consultant in several widely separated hospitals treating patients from a very big, somewhat isolated, area, but his enthusiasm never waned and he gained vast experience in a short term. Later in his career he was able to find time to broaden his knowledge by visits to centres in Britain, Canada, and the United States of America, where he was occasionally called upon to lecture. He became an outstanding general surgeon with great technical skill and special interest in selected urological problems, and spent much time in teaching his juniors operative work, using an apprenticeship-like method, so that many surgeons owe to him their sound basic training. Postgraduate education was an important subject, and when the new West Cumberland Hospital was opened in 1964 the excellent postgraduate centre owed much to his efforts, and the courses he organised were always popular and well attended. He was surgical tutor for the area, and later became a member of the Courts of Examiners of the Royal Colleges of Edinburgh and of England. He was elected to the Presidency of the North of England Surgical Society in 1977. He was married and had two daughters. He died on 28 January 1978, aged 61 years.