David Anthony Griffiths was born in Newport, Monmouthshire on 2 August 1940. His father, also named David, was a master painter and decorator and his mother, Lily Doreen née Bateman, was the daughter of a coalminer. He was their oldest son and his brother became a dental surgeon and member of the college. After attending St Woolo’s Primary School in Newport he went to Stowhill Secondary Modern School and Newport and Monmouth College of Technology. At the age of 15, he helped to pay his way by working as a railway clerk at Newport Station. He studied medicine at Bristol University Medical School where he graduated MB, ChB in 1965 and won a prize in gynaecology. During his time there Joseph Mendal Yoffey was an inspirational professor of anatomy. After house jobs at the Bristol Royal Infirmary, he moved to the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, where he was mentored by Anthony Stedman Till. On passing the fellowship of the college in 1971, he became a consultant general surgeon with the East Somerset NHS Trust based at the Yeovil District Hospital. He was also a visiting professor of anatomy at the University of Iowa College of Medicine. A member of the Anatomical Society of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the American Association of Clinical Anatomists, he was also a council member of the British Association of Urological Surgeons and an honorary fellow of a medical society in Bologna. In 1965 he married Denise Rosemary Powell Mantel and they had two sons. He was keen to develop new approaches to medical education and contributed papers on various teaching aids. Outside medicine he enjoyed painting and riding. He died on 25 August 2018 aged 78 at Dorset County Hospital and was survived by Denise, their sons James and Richard, and grandchildren Rory, Finn, Max and Saoirse.