Eric Miles Atkinson was born in London on 28 April 1895 and was educated at Epsom College. He entered St Bartholomew's Hospital in 1912 but his medical studies were interrupted by the outbreak of war in 1914 when he served as a motorcycle despatch rider with the British Expeditionary Force in France. He was sent back to continue his studies and he qualified early in 1917 and then served until the end of the war as a Surgeon-Lieutenant in the Royal Navy. After the war he returned to Bart's as a demonstrator in anatomy and achieved the FRCS in 1920. He was especially interested in otolaryngology and worked as an assistant ENT surgeon at the Prince of Wales's Hospital, Tottenham. In 1926 he was awarded the Jacksonian Prize at the Royal College of Surgeons for his essay on brain abscess and appointed a Hunterian Professor in 1928. From 1925 to 1935 Miles Atkinson was surgeon-in-charge of the ENT department of the Royal United Hospital, Bath. He then spent a year with Dr Wilder Penfield at the Neurological Institute in New York, where he was a staff member of the New York Hospital and later of the Bellevue Hospital. In 1937 he became a diplomate of the American Board of Otolaryngology and in 1938 a member of the American Academy of Otolaryngology. Miles Atkinson thus continued in hospital and private practice in New York till 1964 when he moved to live and practise on Nantucket Island. For several months before his death he suffered from the effects of vascular disease in the peripheral and coronary arteries. He died in the Nantucket Cottage Hospital, Massachusetts on 26 April 1978 and he was survived by his wife and a son and daughter in the United States and by another son, an Oxford graduate.