Saw Leong was born in Burma on 19 October 1918 in Mudon, where his father, U Saw Ohn Pe, was a landowner and his mother, Daw Tan Ma Chan, a businesswoman. His uncle, Tan Chan Taik, was an ophthalmologist in Rangoon. His sisters, Ma Thwe Ohn Pe and Thein Thein Myint, became GPs in Moulmein and Streatham respectively. He was educated at St Patrick's School, Moulmein, and entered the Rangoon University to study medicine. When the Japanese invaded Burma he joined a column of refugees who trekked out of Burma via Imphal, discarding medical texts from his backpack en route, an experience that taught him, he said, the value of adversity. He completed his medical studies in Lahore and qualified in 1944. He immediately joined the RAMC in India and served in the Burma campaign, reaching the rank of Captain. On demobilisation in 1947, he went by troopship to England to specialise in ophthalmology. While reading for the FRCS, he did junior posts in Chepstow and Maidstone. He became the thirteenth Burmese to gain the FRCS and the first to qualify in ophthalmology. He then became senior registrar at the Royal Eye Hospital under Arnold Sorsby and Ronald Pitts Crick, and at Swansea General Hospital under Roy Thomas and F G Hibbert. In 1957, he emigrated to Canada to do a rotating internship at the Hôtel Dieu Hospital in Kingston, Ontario, and the following year entered a private eye and ENT practice in Lethbridge, Alberta, with staff appointments at St Michaels and the Municipal Hospitals. He married Phyllis Evans, a former sister from King's College Hospital. They had one son, Richard, and one daughter, Rosemarie. Neither of their children went into medicine, but two nephews and a niece did: Wynn Naing is a physician in New York, Steven Myint is a microbiologist, and Fiona Myint FRCS is a vascular surgeon at the Royal Free Hospital. His hobbies included tennis, squash and gardening. In 2001, he received the award of physician of the year from his local physicians. Quite suddenly, he developed a lymphoma of the stomach for which he received chemotherapy, which reactivated hepatitis B, from which he died on 15 October 2001.