John Eric Richardson was a consultant surgeon at the London Hospital. He was born on 24 February 1916, to Beatrice née Sharpe and Cecil George Richardson, a general practitioner in Loughborough. He was educated at Clifton, where he played rugby in the 1st XV, and entered the London Hospital Medical College. There he was influenced by Russell Howard, Sir Henry Souttar and Sir James Walton. He played rugby for the hospital, won the Andrew Clark prize for clinical medicine and pathology, and acquired the nickname 'Sam', for reasons which have never been explained. He qualified with honours in the final MB just before the outbreak of war, did junior jobs at the London, Poplar, and Liverpool Children's Hospitals, and passed his final FRCS in 1940, but had to wait until he was 25 before he could be awarded the diploma. He then joined the RNVR as a surgical and orthopaedic specialist. He was at once posted to the battleship Prince of Wales just after she had hosted the signing of the Atlantic Charter by Churchill and Roosevelt, and sailed with her and Repulse to Singapore. On 10 December 1941 both were sunk by Japanese aircraft with the loss of some thousand officers and men. Richardson went on deck for the emergency treatment of the wounded, and when the ship was abandoned was picked up by a destroyer and taken to Singapore. He was seconded to an Army unit for two months during the retreat in Malaya and was evacuated three days before Singapore surrendered. A few months later his ship was torpedoed by a German submarine and Richardson spent 18 hours in an open boat before being picked up by an American cargo ship. While still on active service he found time to pass the London MS. After the war, he returned to the London as first assistant to the new academic surgical unit under Victor Dix, and won a Rockefeller travelling fellowship in 1947 which took him to the Massachusetts General Hospital as a fellow in clinical surgery. There he studied the metabolic response to injury and learned their techniques of endocrine surgery. He returned to the London as senior lecturer and honorary consultant. For his juniors this was a golden era; he had astonishing dexterity, and once he had given up some of his slow North American habits, he became as rapid as he was delicate. He became known for his work on the thyroid and parathyroid, for gastrectomy, and for carrying out portacaval anastomoses when these were still very new. In the early 1950's he led the way to introducing rational correction of fluid and electrolyte imbalance in a day when some of his older colleagues disdained any intravenous fluids. He was appointed to the Prince of Wales Hospital, Tottenham, the Royal Masonic and King Edward VII Hospital for Officers. He was Hunterian Professor in 1953 and Lettsomian lecturer and President of the Medical Society of London in 1973. He was consultant surgeon to the Royal Navy. He married Elizabeth Webster in 1943, when she was serving as a Wren, and they had a son, James, and a daughter, Suzie. Elizabeth died in 1991 and he married Bettine Long in 1994. He died on 1 March 1998, survived by Bettine and his children.