Albrecht F. W. Encke was born on 24 June 1935 in Remscheid, Germany. His father was a psychiatrist and his mother’s father and maternal grandfather were GPs. He studied medicine at the universities of Freiburg, Tubingen, Vienna and Cologne. After qualifying in Cologne in 1961, he spent a year at the Muhlenberg Hospital in Plainfield, New Jersey, USA as a rotating intern. On his return to Germany he joined the staff of the department of surgery at the University of Heidelberg to complete his training, working with Fritz Linder. After submitting a thesis on disseminated intervascular coagulation in surgery he was offered a teaching post at Heidelberg and from 1973 worked as Linder’s deputy head of department. Six years later, in 1979, he was appointed chairman of the division of general and vascular surgery at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. His main interests were in pathophysiology of coagulation and thrombosis, shock, sepsis and intensive care, as well as surgical gastroenterology with a special emphasis on oncology. In 1986 he performed the first liver transplant in Frankfurt and was the lead in developing a liver transplantation programme. The author of nearly 250 published articles, he published extensively in hepatobiliary-pancreatic, gastric, and colorectal surgery. He was the editor of *Zentralblatt fur Chirurgie* and a member of numerous important surgical societies. In 2001 he was awarded the honorary fellowship of the college and he was also an honorary fellow of the Americal College of Surgeons for whom he was a governor-at-large in Germany. He died on 7 December 2022 aged 87.