Sir Donald Acheson was Chief Medical Officer for England from 1983 to 1991, a period that included the rise of HIV infection and the bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) crisis. He was born in Belfast on 17 September 1926, the son of Malcolm King Acheson, a doctor specialising in public health, and Dorothy Josephine Acheson née Rennoldson, the daughter of a Tyneside shipbuilder. He was educated at Merchiston Castle School in Edinburgh and went on to Brasenose College, Oxford, and then Middlesex Hospital, where he completed his clinical training. His elder brother Roy was also at Brasenose and became professor of community medicine at Cambridge. After qualifying, Acheson joined the RAF medical branch, where he was an acting squadron leader from 1953 to 1955. He then returned to Oxford as a medical tutor at the Radcliffe Infirmary. There he organised the pioneering Oxford Record Linkage Study, and led the unit of clinical epidemiology, becoming May reader in 1965. When it was decided that there should be a new clinical school at Southampton, Acheson was initially approached for advice, and in 1968 he became professor of clinical epidemiology and foundation dean of the medical school. In the following years he was director of the Medical Research Council's (MRC) unit on environmental epidemiology (1979 to 1983), where his work on the health risks of asbestos led to the introduction of new safety standards and a ban on the importation of blue and brown asbestos. During this period he also sat on a number of committees and boards relating to public health. In 1983 he was appointed Chief Medical Officer. When the full threat of a possible AIDS epidemic became clear, he successfully lobbied the Conservative government for a public health campaign to attempt to change sexual behaviour. He also introduced tests to screen blood donors following early cases of haemophiliacs becoming HIV positive. After leaving office he held positions at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and University College London. In 1997 he was commissioned by the Labour government to chair an independent inquiry into inequalities in health, which became known as the *Acheson report* (*Independent inquiry into inequalities in health report*, London, Stationery Office, 1997). He became an honorary fellow of our College in 1988. He was a member of the General Medical Council from 1984 to 1991, was a past president of the Association of Physicians of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and of the British Medical Association (from 1996 to 1997). He held numerous lectureships across the UK and worked abroad on projects for the World Health Organization, which in 1994 awarded him the Leon Bernard Foundation prize for his contributions to social medicine. He married twice. His first wife was Barbara Mary Castle, a nurse at Middlesex Hospital, by whom he had a son and five daughters (one of whom predeceased him). He divorced in 2002. His second wife was Angela Judith Roberts, with whom he had one daughter. In 2007 he published his autobiography *One doctor's odyssey: the social lesion/the memoirs of Sir Donald Acheson* (Bury St Edmunds, Arima Publishing). Acheson died on 10 January 2010.