Adrian Ede Flatt was a pioneering hand surgeon and chairman of the department of orthopedics at Baylor University Medical Center, Dallas, Texas. He was born in Frinton-on-Sea, Essex on 26 August 1921, the son of Leslie Neeve Flatt, a mechanical engineer with the Indian Railways who during Second World War ran the entire railway system in India, and Barbara Flatt née Allen, a homemaker and commercial artist. The Flatt family had been farmers in East Anglia since the Viking invasion. When he was six months old, he was taken by his mother by sea to India, where he stayed until he was two. He caught dengue fever as a baby and developed rickets as a very young child in India. He and his sister Penny later lived with their grandmother in the family home in England. They saw their parents infrequently – their father would come home every three or four years or so for six months and their mother would travel back and forth from India to England, staying six months in each country. Flatt attended Haileybury College, where he won the botany prize and was an officer in the Officers’ Training Corps and a captain of the rowing and rugby teams. He studied medicine at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge during the Second World War, cramming three years’ study into two and, during his time-off, helping in London hospitals. He was also a member of the Home Guard. He arrived at Cambridge knowing he wanted to be a surgeon and, after hearing an introductory lecture by Sir John Ryle, regius professor of physic, on hands, determined he would focus on hand surgery. He went on to his clinical studies at the London Hospital, where he worked through the Blitz; the hospital sometimes received hundreds of casualties each night and was directly hit by bombs 13 times. He qualified in 1946. He was first a houseman on the medical unit at the London Hospital, and then trained in general and orthopaedic surgery under Sir Reginald Watson-Jones and Sir Henry Osmond-Clark. He also completed a year of training in plastic surgery under Thomas Pomfret Kilner at Stoke Mandeville Hospital. From 1949 to 1950 he was a squadron leader in charge of No 3 Parachute Surgical Rescue Team. The team went out to Ceylon, where he was surgeon to all the armed forces on the island, stationed at the RAF services hospital in Negombo. He was also a visiting surgeon to RAF stations throughout Ceylon, Singapore, Malaya, Indochina and Hong Kong. After his military service, he went back to England, where he taught anatomy at Cambridge and the Royal College of Surgeons of England. He gained his FRCS in 1953 and, in 1954, was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to the USA to train in the evolving field of hand surgery. For three months he travelled by train across the USA, visiting hand surgeons in the major cities and stayed with Sterling Bunnell in San Francisco. He then had a six-month fellowship in New York at the Roosevelt Hospital and a three-month fellowship in New Orleans. He returned to the UK and continued working in orthopaedics as a first assistant, but after a year was invited to Iowa City to start the first academic hand surgery unit in the USA, as professor of orthopedics and anatomy and director of the division of hand surgery at the University of Iowa. At Iowa, he directed major research programs in congenital anomalies and biomechanics of the hand and carried out extensive clinical research into rheumatoid arthritis. He developed two patents – for artificial finger and wrist joints. He stayed in Iowa for 22 years and then moved to Connecticut as chief of surgery at Norwalk Hospital and a clinical professor of orthopedics at Yale University, responsible for teaching hand surgery. After three years, in 1982, he relocated to Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, Texas as full-time chief of orthopedic surgery. He held this position until his retirement from active clinical practice in 1992, when he was named chief emeritus at the George Truett James Orthopedic Institute at Baylor Dallas. From 1964 to 1991 he was also a consultant in hand surgery for the US Air Force. During his career he trained 50 fellows in hand surgery from 14 countries. He wrote nearly 200 articles in peer-reviewed journals and three books on conditions and medical treatment of the hand. In 1976 he became president of the American Society for Surgery of the Hand and was instrumental in establishing the *Journal of Hand Surgery*, for which he served as editor-in-chief from 1980 to 1990. He received many honours and awards, including in 1972 the Kappa Delta Award for his outstanding orthopaedic research and, in 1992, was named as an International Pioneer of Hand Surgery by the International Federation of Societies for Surgery of the Hand. He was an honorary member of several hand societies across the world and was a visiting professor at many institutions. He was a Hunterian Professor at the Royal College of Surgeons of England in 1962 and gave a lecture on ‘Surgical rehabilitation of the rheumatoid hand’. He enjoyed travel and reading. He also cast hands of famous people from around the world, including seven former presidents, actors, celebrities and athletes. These are now on display at the Adrian E Flatt MD Hand Collection at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, Texas. He was married three times. In 1955 he married Adele Fulton, a nurse from New York. They had a son, Andrew James. His wife died in 1975 and in 1977 he married Carol Ann Connors. This marriage ended in divorce in 1988 and two years later he married Judith K Johnson, a lawyer. His son Andrew died in 1990. Adrian Ede Flatt died on 14 October 2017. He was 96.