Andrew Lowdon was born on 12 April 1911 at Greenock, the son of Rev. C. Ross Lowdon and Alison Gilchrist his wife. He commenced his education at the Greenock Academy, but completed his school days at the Royal High School in Edinburgh where he remained to do his medical course at the University. He had a distinguished undergraduate career, winning the Ettles Scholarship and the Leslie Gold Medal, and after qualifying in 1936 and holding house appointments at the Royal Infirmary and the Royal Hospital for Sick Children, he obtained the FRCS Ed in 1939. It was during this period that he came under the influence of David Wilkie and James Graham, to whom he often referred later with gratitude. When war broke out he was already in the Territorial RAMC and was therefore called up at once and spent the next two years as a surgical specialist in Palestine. He subsequently served with the Eighth Army from Alamein to Tunisia, and then in the Sicilian campaign. In 1944 he returned to Britain, and as Lieutenant-Colonel in charge of a surgical division in No 6 General Hospital he was involved in the final phase of the war in NE Europe. He was twice mentioned in dispatches and was appointed OBE in 1944. After demobilization in 1945 he returned to Edinburgh and was invited by Professor Learmonth to join his unit and spent the following nine years as lecturer and then senior lecturer in the University department of surgery. This was a very important period for him, because it not only gave him the experience of academic work which influenced the rest of his life, but it also seems certain that Learmonth's method of organizing regular meetings at which representatives of all the specialist units in his department of surgery were able to discuss matters of common interest laid the foundation for Lowdon's interdepartmental teaching programme when he went to Newcastle. This he did in 1954 when he was appointed Professor of Surgery in the University of Durham, the Chair subsequently being transferred to the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. As surgeon to the Royal Victoria Infirmary he was distinguished especially for his contributions to the surgery of the alimentary tract; but the reforms in the medical school which he pioneered in collaboration with his medical colleague Professor George Smart were so outstanding that they aroused interest throughout the British medical schools, and exerted an influence which spread far beyond Newcastle. It was therefore not surprising that when the deanship of the School became vacant in 1960 Lowdon was appointed to it, and in this appointment he was so successful that in 1965 he was made Pro Vice-Chancellor of the University, and also a member of the Royal Commission on Medical Education. Andrew Lowdon's wisdom, enthusiasm and concern for the welfare of his fellows made him a natural leader, and students loved him. In 1936 he was Senior President of the Royal Medical Society of Edinburgh, and in 1956 President of the University of Durham Medical Society. He was honorary President of the British Medical Students' Association in 1960, and that same year he was honoured by the University of Sydney by election as Norman Paul Visiting Professor. The Royal College of Surgeons of England elected him to the Fellowship ad eundem in 1959. The mere recital of all these activities is sufficient to indicate how he must have taxed his reserves of energy, and it was presumably overstrain which accounted for his sudden death at the age of 54, which occurred on 2 September 1965 while he was out walking on the moors. In 1948 he married Glenys Mairi Macdonald Donaldson, who was also medically qualified. She and their four children survived him.