Anil Chandra Chatterjee was a general surgeon who also specialised in surgical oncology and urology. Born in Burdwan, West Bengal on 1 June 1929, he was the son of Atul Chatterjee, a dispenser for the Eastern Railway of India, and his wife Achala Devi née Mukerjee. He studied chemistry at the Presidency College in Calcutta and then attended the medical college attached to Calcutta Hospital where he was a house surgeon and won the Sutherland medal in medical jurisprudence. From 1961 to 1963 he studied at the University of Liverpool where he was awarded the Thelwell Thomas fellowship in surgical pathology. Moving to Devon he was house surgeon to Cyril Shaldon at the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital and then became house surgeon to G C W James at Clare Hall Hospital, South Mimms. He passed the fellowship of the Edinburgh college in 1968 and the college fellowship in 1969. He initially practiced as a consultant surgeon in Cambridge before moving to the USA to take up a fellowship in the department of surgery at Baylor University Medical Centre, Dallas, Texas. On returning to India he was professor of surgery at Goa Medical College and senior consultant surgeon at the Assembly of God Hospital in Kolkata. Said to have invented over a dozen innovative surgical procedures, he was the author of numerous research articles published in the international medical press. Described as an ‘elegant gentleman of sharp intelligence’ he was an orator and a keen debater – winning a debating championship when still a student – he was extremely well read in English and Bengali literature and poetry, world history and philosophy. Other interests were table tennis and driving. He married Miss Mukerjee in 1955. Continuing to practise into his eighties and he had visited patients in hospital on the morning of the day that he succumbed to a stroke. He died on 12 November 2015, aged 86.