David John Fuller, the only son of Wilfred Evelyn Fuller, a civil servant, and of Joan Anne (née Lovering), was born on 23 September 1939 at Fowey, Cornwall. He was educated at Welwyn Garden City Grammar School and London University before entering Charing Cross Hospital Medical School. After qualification he held resident appointments at Charing Cross, St Thomas's, and Royal Masonic Hospitals before going to Southampton in 1968 as a rotating surgical trainee. From 1968 he spent a further two years in Bristol before moving to Oxford as a research registrar. He was shortly upgraded to an honorary senior registrar appointment in the Nuffield department of orthopaedic surgery and became a consultant there in 1975, as well as in the accident department of the John Radcliffe Hospital. The University made him MA (status) by virtue of his outstanding undergraduate and postgraduate teaching. Fuller's early research interests in microsurgical techniques led on to a study of the embryonic growth of limbs in relation to congenital malformations. This resulted in a thesis for which he was awarded the MS and also encouraged him to set up a specialist club-foot service for the Oxford region as well as for Yeovil, where he was appointed as honorary visiting consultant. He made significant contributions to knee and upper limb surgery, particularly in relation to injuries, and was an enthusiastic teacher. He published a number of papers in the *Journal of bone and joint surgery*, and he served for four years as honorary secretary of the Girdlestone Orthopaedic Society where he made great contributions to international orthopaedics by organizing meetings abroad and in Oxford. He became a member of the cases committee of the Medical Protection Society and he also gave much time to the St Luke's Nursing Home for the Handicapped and Elderly. In 1983 David Fuller was appointed as Founder Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery in the University of Bristol and was due to take up the appointment on 1 September of that year. Sadly, he and his family set out in the summer for a holiday in the Scilly Isles when he, his wife and three children, two girls and a boy, all died in a helicopter crash off Penzance. He had married his wife, Dr Jean Sinclair, in 1966, and she worked as a general practitioner as well as undertaking family planning work and assisting him in private practice. He was survived by his father and his wife, Jean, by her mother and sisters.