Arthur Nurick was chief medical officer to Williamson Diamonds Ltd, Tanzania, and later a general practitioner in Western Australia. He was the third and last child of Max Nurick, a north London GP, and Annie Nurick. After Haberdashers' Aske's School, he entered the Middlesex Hospital Medical School in 1938. His teachers included David Patey and Dick Handley. He passed his MB BS and MRCS LRCP in 1944, and joined the RAMC. After military training, he was attached to the Indian Army Medical Corps and sent to Burma with a mobile surgical unit. He acquired a wind-up gramophone and some 78 rpm records of classical music, including a Beethoven symphony on five 12-inch discs and excerpts from Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov's *Caucasian sketches*. Whenever the spring of the gramophone's clockwork motor broke, he dismantled it, annealed the broken end over a spirit lamp, and shaped it to fit. Eventually the spring was so short he had to crank it up three times to get through a 12-inch disc. He told this and other stories, but never spoke about his experiences treating men newly released from the Japanese prison camps. After demobilisation in 1948, he returned to Middlesex Hospital. He worked for a short time in Lyons under Pierre Mallet-Guy and later published three papers on cholangiography (two as sole author, one with Patey and C G Whiteside). With his friend and Middlesex contemporary John (later Sir John) Golding, he kept a five-ton sailing boat at Ramsgate. In 1950, he married Jane Musgrave, a medical photographer at the Middlesex; they had met when he took his sailing photographs to the photographic department hoping to get them printed. In this period the NHS had produced many more would-be consultants than there were posts. After an unhappy locum appointment at the Royal West Sussex Hospital, Chichester (when Jane developed appendicitis he ensured that she was admitted to St Richard's), Arthur and his family returned to London. Through Middlesex contacts he was introduced to a Canadian geologist, John Williamson, who had discovered a rich kimberlite pipe in Tanganyika in 1940 and - despite wartime and post-war difficulties - had developed it into one of the biggest diamond mines in the world. Williamson had come to London for treatment for his oesophageal cancer. Arthur seized the opportunity and in 1957 became chief medical officer to Williamson Diamonds Ltd, responsible for medical services and public health for a self-contained township with a population of more than 10,000 African, Indian and European employees and dependents - and personal physician to the owner. There was a well-equipped hospital - by the standards of the time and place - and one other doctor, a very experienced Brahmin from Pune. Having made it a condition of his appointment that his work should not be limited to the population of the mine, he held weekly clinics at the nearest government hospital (at first the district medical officer there was Giovanni Balletto, one of the Italian soldiers who escaped from a POW camp by attempting to climb Mount Kenya) and an Africa Inland Mission hospital (where, despite his intractable atheism, he made lasting friends among the medical and nursing staff). Many patients were admitted for treatment at the mine hospital, presenting a full range of surgical challenges with almost no possibility of tertiary referral. Instruments and prostheses were improvised if necessary. For this and other work he was appointed as an honorary consultant surgeon to the Government of Tanzania. Recreation facilities at the mine included a sailing club on a large dam built to supply water for the mineral processing plant. Arthur built two sailing dinghies, was a competitive sailor and more than once was commodore of the club. The mine - south of Lake Victoria - was also within an easy day's drive of the Serengeti National Park, which the family visited many times. In 1973 Arthur and Jane settled in Western Australia, where - deterred by what seemed an insular Perth surgical establishment - Arthur joined a GP practice in Narrogin. As was then usual in country towns, the hospital had no surgeon or doctors and the local GPs would admit and treat their own patients. While practising mainly as a GP, he operated on many patients who would otherwise have had to be referred to Perth (his baggage from Africa had included a part-built 27-foot sailing yacht and instruments for the transurethral resection of the prostate). In 1988 Arthur and Jane retired to Albany on the south coast of Western Australia, where he was soon in demand as a locum GP, maker of furniture and repairer of all sorts of gadgets. Widowed in 1996, Arthur gave up general practice but continued assisting in theatre at the Albany hospital. He took part in many hundreds of operations and was delighted when in his eighties he had to sign a new contract with the department of health and start contributing to a superannuation fund. The last operation in his records is a rotator cuff repair in 2007; until then he had worked in theatre two or three sessions a week. He died peacefully in a hospice on 19 August 2013 at the age of 91 after refusing further surgery for failing circulation in his leg, which would have left him unable to stay in his multi-level house or use his beloved model engineering workshop. He was survived by his two children, John and Elizabeth.