James Lawrie was a paediatric surgeon and professor of surgery at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, northern Nigeria. He was born on 19 November 1924, the son of a Church of Scotland minister, and was educated in Glasgow. Before attending medical school, he served in the Merchant Navy with the Blue Funnel Line during the Second World War. He went on to study medicine at Glasgow University and qualified in 1953. After house officer posts, he spent two years in Richmond, Virginia, USA as a surgical intern and then returned to Glasgow, where he was a house surgeon to the influential surgeon Charles Illingworth, professor of surgery. He also spent time at the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Glasgow. He later moved on to the Welsh National School of Medicine at Cardiff, where he researched gastric function. At Cardiff, he decided to focus on paediatric surgery and moved to a senior surgical registrar appointment at Great Ormond Street Hospital, London, where he worked for two years with Andrew Wilkinson. When Harold Scarborough, who held the chair of medicine in Cardiff, became the first dean of the newly-established faculty of medicine at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria, he recruited Lawrie to join him as the chair of surgery, a post he took up in 1969. He began with very few resources and had to travel for many miles every week, operating in remote rural and mission hospitals. By the time he moved on he left a flourishing department with more than 30 staff. In 1984, he was awarded an OBE for services to medicine and education in Nigeria. In 1985 he became director of surgery at the military hospital in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and in 1991 he returned to Africa, as professor of surgery at Blantyre University, Malawi. He later taught in Malaysia, Kenya and Ethiopia, and was an examiner in Nigeria and Ghana. He was interested in sports; as a student, he represented Glasgow University and played for Scottish Universities, and in Nigeria he played polo and captained his local team. He was also an expert yachtsman. In 1965 he married Hanne, a Danish doctor. They had two children, Astrid and John, and two grandchildren, Natasha and Nicholas. Lawrie died on 25 June 2017 at the age of 92.