Robert Arnold Fischl was chief of the plastic surgery section of Danbury Hospital, Danbury, Connecticut. He was born in Dresden, Germany on 18 June 1928. His father, Emil Fischl, was a paper manufacturer; his mother, Bettina Hahn, was the daughter of a banker. They left Germany in 1939 and settled in Newcastle upon Tyne, where Robert was enroled in the Royal Grammar School. During the Second World War, he was evacuated to Penrith in the Lake District, where he lived with a family for four years. He kept in touch with this family throughout his life, bringing his new bride to meet them and receiving their grandchildren at his home many years later. A municipal scholarship (Gateshead) secured his entrance to King’s College at the University of Durham, Newcastle, where he qualified in 1951. He served as a house surgeon at Bedford General Hospital and the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle, and then as a senior house officer at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Gateshead and at Hammersmith Hospital in London. During the Malaysia Campaign, he served as a surgeon in the RAMC from 1953 to 1955, emerging with the rank of captain. Returning from Malaysia, he went to New York for training in plastic surgery. He spent several years as a resident and then chief resident at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, where, years later, he became an assistant clinical professor of surgery. From 1962 to 1964 he was a registrar at the Roehampton Plastic Surgery Centre. In 1964, he moved to the United States, having accepted a position at a New York hospital to head a plastic surgery unit. At the same time, he established a private practice in New York. Some years later, he moved his practice to Danbury Hospital in Danbury, Fairfield County, Connecticut, where he was chief of plastic surgery for 26 years. In New York, he became president of the British Medical Graduates of New York, a social organisation to strengthen ties and keep the community of British doctors together. He was a co-founder of the Connecticut Society of Plastic Surgery and chairman of the board of trustees of Fairfield County Medical Society. He invented several surgical instruments, among them an angled knife and a retractor for use in plastic surgery. He wrote widely and published papers on hemifacial atrophy and Mondor’s disease, among other topics. He developed new treatments for keloids and for unilateral breast reduction for asymmetry, a procedure for vertical abdominoplasty, a method for using adhesive for primary closure of the skin and developed a flap for nasolabial defects. A paper on ring constriction and secondary syndactylism took him to meetings in Australia, France and many cities in the United States. He attended international meetings in many foreign capitals, where he fostered friendships with Greek, French, Turkish and Japanese plastic surgeons. He kept his ties to his medical school classmates throughout his life, and for several years enjoyed celebrating his birthday at the annual June meeting of the British Association of Plastic Surgeons. He was a talented watercolourist and for ten years, on his day off, he taught an anatomy course for artists at Silvermine Art Center in New Canaan, Connecticut. He exhibited his paintings and won many prizes in shows in New England and Hawaii, where he lived in the winter after retiring. In 1966, he married Irene Pachanik, a writer, editor and adjunct professor of journalism at the University of Connecticut. Robert A Fischl died on 26 May 2017, two weeks short of his 89th birthday.