Achyutananda Sinha was professor and head of the ENT department at Patna Medical College Hospital, Patna, India. Born on 4 October 1927 in Dhanbad, India, he was the son of Gaya Prasad Sinha, who worked in the Bihar Civil Service, and his wife Tara Devi. After attending Patna High School, he matriculated in 1942 and attended Patna Science College for two years. He studied medicine at Patna University, graduating MB BS in 1949. After initial house jobs in the ENT department of Patna Medical College, he travelled to the UK and worked as a registrar and senior registrar between 1953 and 1956. During that time he spent a year (1954) in the USA working as a resident in otolaryngology at St Luke’s Hospital and the Manhattan ENT Hospital in New York. He passed the fellowship of the college in 1957 and worked in the ENT department at Neath General Hospital for a year. On his return to India in January 1958, he was a junior ENT surgeon at the Patna Medical College, before being appointed associate professor (in 1966, professor) and head of otolaryngology at the All India Institute of Medical Science in New Delhi in December 1969. At the Institute he pioneered a separate ear, nose and throat department and later set up the same in Ranchi, where he was professor and head of ENT from January 1979 to August 1974, and Patna, where he held the same position from August 1974 to June 1985 when he retired. Publishing extensively throughout his career, he was revered as a teacher and was a past president of the Indian Association of Otolaryngologists, and surgeon to the president of India. He was also principal of Patna Medical College and director of health services in Bihar. Outside medicine he was a district governor for Rotary International and, after retiring, took up meditation and charitable work. Married to his wife, Indu, for 53 years, he moved to the UK for the last 7 years of his life to live with his three sons, all of whom became consultants in the fields of ophthalmology, otolaryngology and orthopaedics respectively. When he died of heart failure on 29 December 2017, aged 90, he was survived by his sons, seven grandchildren and ten great grandchildren.