David Campbell studied medicine after overcoming an initial desire to be an engineer. He attended London University and trained at the Royal Free Hospital, graduating in 1967. While there he gained notoriety as a student for hanging a chamber pot on the hook at the end of a massive crane being used in rebuilding works – and managing to avoid being sent down. He did house jobs in trauma and orthopaedics at the Lord Mayor Treloar Hospital in Alton Hampshire and then worked as a senior orthopaedic registrar at Southampton General Hospital, specialising particularly in paediatric orthopaedics. In 1973 he passed the fellowship of the college. Awarded a travelling scholarship to Switzerland in 1976, he studied the non-union of fractures. When he returned to Southampton he researched a successful leg lengthening device. In 1979 he was appointed a consultant in orthopaedics and trauma at the Countess of Chester Hospital and the Grosvenor Nuffield Hospital in Chester. During his time there he was instrumental in directing the expansion of the department and, with a particular interest in paediatric orthopaedics and lower limb surgery, built up a relationship with Dorin Park which is a special school for handicapped children. He reorganised screening for developmental dysplasia of the hip and used both the Charnley and Furlong methods to perform hip arthroplasty, later turning to the Lubinus procedure. He was also a pioneer of unicompartmental knee replacement surgery. The explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant destroyed local facilities for operating on children with orthopaedic abnormalities and David arranged for one child to be treated gratis at the Grosvenor Nuffield, sadly the government refused to allow any more to come but he travelled to Minsk to offer his services. He was known as a supportive trainer among his juniors and he also undertook medicolegal work for his colleagues. President of the Chester and North Wales Medical Society in 2002, he was also president of the Medicolegal Society. He retired in 2006. On 4 October 2021 he died from a catastrophic haemorrhagic stroke and was survived by his wife Susan, a nursing sister whom he had met while working at the Royal Free, children Elizabeth, Victoria and James, and their families.