James Cyril Angell received his medical education at the Middlesex Hospital. After qualification he was for a time resident surgical officer at St Mark's Hospital and senior surgical registrar at the Central Middlesex Hospital and the Middlesex Hospital before moving to specialise in urology, and became consultant urologist at Ashford Hospital in Middlesex. His book *The acute abdomen for the man on the spot* (1965 and 1968) received good reviews in several journals, and the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine linked it with Zachary Cope's *Acute abdomen in rhyme* as 'meriting a place not on the bookshelf but on the table or bedside of practising medicos.' Angell died on 2 September 1994.