Francis Doran, commonly known as 'Mike', was a colourful character whose enthusiasm for blood sports in the hunting field competed with his devotion to the surgical care of his patients and with his intellectual exercises in the literary sphere. He was born in 1911, the only son of a Manchester dentist. He enjoyed university life at Cambridge and completed his medical education in Manchester, qualifying with both the conjoint and the MB. He took a series of junior posts in the Manchester Royal Infirmary and the Duchess of York's Hospital for Babies, gaining his FRCS in 1940. He joined the RAF and as squadron leader served in India and Burma, at one time being among the troops surrounded in the notorious 'Imphal box'. Returning to Manchester he became surgical chief assistant at the Christie Hospital and Holt Radium Institute, where he completed his MD thesis, before being appointed in 1951 as consultant general surgeon to All Saints' Hospital, Bromsgrove. His surgical publications related to such important if mundane topics as hernia, varicose veins and postoperative emboli, but his book *Mind* was altogether more adventurous. A true countryman, a battered Landrover was his ordinary transport but his horse had been seen tethered in the hospital car park in readiness for the chase. He retired to good hunting country near Ledbury in Herefordshire, where he died on 26 December 1995, survived by a daughter, his wife Anne having predeceased him.