Richard Guy Fiddian-Green was professor of general surgery at the University of Massachusetts. Born on 8 March 1940 in Matatiele, East Griqualand, South Africa, he was the second son of two doctors, William Brandreth Fiddian-Green, a GP, and his wife, Isobel Alys (known as Alys). Her father was Colonel Norman Faichnie who had served in the RAMC. He attended Clifton Preparatory School, Michaelhouse School and Cape Town University, where he studied engineering for a year before switching to medicine. Coming to the UK he went up to Brasenose College, Oxford following in the footsteps of both his father and his elder brother Charles. He did house jobs at St Mary’s Hospital working with Frank Penman and was research assistant to Leslie Le Quesne in the surgical unit at the Middlesex. After passing the fellowship in 1971, he went to the USA and spent a year in the gastroenterology department at Harvard’s Beth Israel Hospital in Boston working with W Silen. In 1973 he returned to South Africa as a surgical registrar at Groote Schuur Hospital and the Red Cross Children’s Hospital in Cape Town. While there he was influenced by Jan Hendrick Louw who was the surgeon-in-chief and became known as the founder of paediatric surgery in South Africa. He returned to the States in 1976 and spent eight years at the University of Michigan before being appointed professor of general surgery at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. While he was there he carried out the ground breaking research which resulted in the development of the tonometer for use in gastric surgery. When he was training he met Prunella MacRobert from Amersham, Buckinghamshire and he married her in Pretoria in 1968. They had three daughters, Nina, Claire and Alice. Among his many interests he enjoyed squash, cricket and trout fishing – an enjoyment he had maintained since his Michaelhouse days when he had been chairman of the Trout Club. His marriage ended in divorce and, when he died of a heart attack in London on 5 February 2014 aged 73, he was survived by his daughters and grandchildren.