Warren Henry Cole was born at Clay Center, Kansas, on 24 July 1898. He attended the University of Kansas obtaining his BSc in 1918. His clinical studies were at the Washington University School of Medicine, St Louis, and within two years he had graduated as a doctor of medicine. His year as an intern was at the City Hospital in Baltimore and following this he spent five years from 1921 to 1926 in the residency programme at Barnes Hospital, St Louis. In 1924 while still a junior resident and working with Evarts Graham he initiated cholecystography, originally administering the opacifying drug by intravenous injection. This valuable contribution was recognised by the award of the Leonard research prize in 1926. Having completed his residency programme he was appointed instructor in surgery and later Associate Professor of Surgery at Washington University School of Medicine at St Louis. In 1936 he was appointed Professor of Surgery at the University of Illinois College of Medicine, where he remained for thirty years until his retirement in 1966. He established himself as a very able operative surgeon who advanced the frontiers of surgery. He had a particular interest in hepato-biliary surgery and the treatment of tumours of the thyroid gland. He made valuable contributions to the treatment of malignant tumours by a combination of surgery and chemotherapy and guided research into the detection of malignant cells in the venous blood leaving a tumour at operation and also in the peripheral circulating blood. In addition to being the co-author of three surgical textbooks he contributed over three hundred articles to surgical journals. He served as President of the Society of University Surgeons in 1940 and of the Chicago Surgical Society in 1942. In 1950 he was First Vice-President of the American College of Surgeons and was elected President in 1955. He was Visiting Professor at the University of London Postgraduate Medical School in 1951 and in 1958 was awarded the Honorary Fellowship. Professor Ian Aird gave the address outlining his many contributions to a wide range of surgical subjects and the Fellowship was presented to him by Sir James Paterson Ross. He was awarded the Honorary Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh in the same year and in 1979 when the Warren Cole Surgical Society was visiting Dublin he received the Honorary Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. He also received awards for distinguished service from the University of Kansas, Washington University and from the American Cancer Society and a gold medal from the Radiological Society of North America. After retiring from practice he moved with his wife to the town of Asheville in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains, where he enjoyed trout fishing and pigeon shooting. He died on 25 May 1990, aged 91 and was survived by his wife, Clara Margaret Lund Cole.