Plarr’s Lives of the Fellows

Sri Kirthi Singha was professor of surgery in Kandy, Sri Lanka. He was born on 14 February 1927, in Moratuwa, in what was then Ceylon. He was the son of A C Fernando, a doctor from Colombo who led the anti-leprosy campaign in Ceylon. He was educated at St Thomas's College and the Royal College, Colombo, where he passed the London matriculation examination. He travelled to England and studied at Sydney Sussex College, Cambridge, before going to the London Hospital. Many in his year group were ex-servicemen. When he arrived in the UK, he bore the name of his father, but changed it by deed poll to Kirthi Singha in 1947. After qualifying, he was a house surgeon to the orthopaedic firm of Watson-Jones, Osmond Clarke and Scotty Law at the London Hospital, did three months in the receiving room and then spent two years as a registrar in associated hospitals, including the Devon and Cornwall Hospital in Plymouth under Mike Reilly. He returned to the London as a junior registrar to surgical outpatients. He moved back to Ceylon, as a senior lecturer in surgery at the University of Ceylon and honorary consultant surgeon at the Kandy General Hospital. He was promoted to founding professor of the faculty of surgery at the newly established Peradeniya campus in 1965. He published on surgical aspects of amoebiasis and ascariasis. In 1969, he authored a concise summary of then known surgical techniques, entitled ‘A Pocket Book of Surgery’. In 1973 he left Sri Lanka and returned to England, where he became a consultant at the Royal South Hants in Southampton. He was married twice: To Marieluise Meissner by whom he had two sons Armin and Miran, and later to Chrisanti De Soysa. Miran has a son, Sam, who has followed in his grandfather’s footsteps by becoming a doctor with the current intention of specialising in orthopaedic surgery. He died peacefully at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital on 1 October 2007.