Robert Acland was a pioneer of plastic and reconstructive microsurgery. He was born in Exeter on 20 June 1941, the younger son of Sir Richard Dyke Acland, 15th baronet of Colum John, a barrister and Labour politician, and Anne Stella Acland née Alford. Acland grew up in the dower house at Killerton, Devon – his father having donated the main manor house and estate to the National Trust in 1944. He attended the local village school and then Bryanston School in Dorset, where he later said he developed an interest in breaking rules. He went on to study medicine at the London Hospital Medical School. After qualifying in 1964, he worked at Bukumbi Hospital in Mwanza, Tanzania. On his return to the UK, he was a senior house officer in Northampton, Mansfield and then Oxford. In 1969, he was a senior registrar in general surgery in Swindon, where he became interested in microsurgery after watching John Cobbett perform a microvascular anastomosis. He then spent two years at the London Hospital studying microsurgical instruments, funded by the Medical Research Council. He improved the tiny needles and threads needed for the surgery, invented the Acland micro vessel clamp and investigated how to prevent microthrombosis. Acland then trained as a plastic surgeon, as a registrar at Canniesburn Hospital in Glasgow from 1972 to 1975. In 1975, he accepted an offer to set up a microsurgery teaching laboratory at the Kleinert Kutz Hand Center in Louisville, Kentucky. He later played a key role in the founding of the University of Louisville’s fresh tissue anatomy dissection laboratory, the first of its kind in the United States. In 1983, he was appointed director and under his leadership the laboratory expanded and improved. Acland’s major work was the *Video atlas of human anatomy*, which used new technologies to capture moving three-dimensional images of structures in the body, from bone to surface anatomy. He also wrote a *Practice manual for microvascular surgery* (CV Mosby Company, St Louis, Mo, 1989), known as the ‘Red book’, a manual of microsurgical techniques, an indispensable tool for trainees. He was a founding member of the International Society for Reconstructive Microsurgery. He was married three times. In 1963 he married Sarah Wood, a fellow student at the London Hospital Medical School. She later became a psychiatrist. They had two children – Beatrice and Daniel. They divorced in 1983 and he married Susan Bishop. They had a son, Benjamin, and a daughter, Emily. They divorced in 1990 and in 1992 he married Bette Levy, a textile artist. Robert Acland died on 6 January 2016 of cholangiocarcinoma. He was 74.