John Charles Leedham-Green was born in Birmingham on 30 October 1902, eldest son of Charles Albert Leedham-Green FRCS (1867-1931), sometime Professor of Surgery at Birmingham University, and his wife, Ethel, née Lees. He was educated at Rugby School and Balliol College, Oxford, where he read chemistry before taking up medicine. He went to the Middlesex Hospital for his clinical studies where he was awarded the Hartley Clinical Prize in 1930, qualifying in 1931. In the same year he won the Rose Hunt Travelling Scholarship from Oxford University which enabled him to visit surgical clinics in Berlin and Stockholm. Junior hospital appointments were in Birmingham and at the Middlesex Hospital where he was house surgeon to Victor Bonney and Sampson Handley and registrar to Sir Gordon Gordon-Taylor. During the war he served in the RAMC as a surgical specialist and was in charge of surgical divisions in hospitals in West Africa, France and India, holding the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. After returning to civilian life he decided to go into general practice in Southwold, Suffolk, doing part-time surgery at Lowestoft Hospital. He remained in general practice for the rest of his career. He was a founder member of the Royal College of General Practitioners and in his time was Chairman of the East Anglia Faculty Board and representative of the Faculty on the Council of the College. In 1970 he was elected FRCGP. He was President of the Rotary Club of Southwold and President of the Southwold Branch of the Royal British Legion. His hobby was correspondence chess. In 1939 he married Gertrude Mary Somerville Caldwell who was a Cambridge medical graduate. He died on 25 February 1984 aged 81 and was survived by his wife Mary, his son Charles who is a mathematics lecturer at Queen Mary College, London, and his daughter Elisabeth.