David Worsley Downham was born on 22 April 1931 in Rock Ferry, Birkenhead, UK. He was the son of Dr Kenneth Downham and his wife Phyllis Worsley Downham née Corrie. After attending Bryanston School he obtained a scholarship to study medicine at Peterhouse College, Cambridge, graduating MB, BChir in 1957. After doing his national service in Northern Ireland and Yorkshire he taught anatomy at St Bartholomew’s Hospital (Bart’s). He then worked as a surgical registrar at St Albans Hospital and as a urologist at the Westminster Hospital in London, passing the fellowship of the college in 1966. In the same year he emigrated to Canada and settled in London, Ontario. In Canada he obtained a further fellowship in urology and was on the staff of St Joseph’s Hospital, London, Ontario. In 1974, he founded the first urology clinic in Orilla. He practiced for 25 years, retiring in 1999, after which he did urology locums in Invercargill, New Zealand and Hobart, Tasmania, Australia. During one of these trips he and his wife met a doctor from the Mao Tao Clinic on the border between Thailand and Burma. Dr Cynthia Maung was an ethnic Karen who had fled the brutal uprising in Burma in 1988 and she made David aware of the need for medical training for her peers. Under the aegis of *Project Umbrella Burma* he visited the clinic for a period of six months for ten years teaching surgery to ethnic Karen students and founded the Kaw Tha Blay College for them. He was known for his endless intellectual curiosity and was an avid reader. During his time at Bart’s he had married Jennifer Eileen Curtis and they had two sons, Christopher and Nicholas. Jennifer died in 1979 and in 1980 he married Catherine Louise Neelands. He died on 29 January 2019 at home in Orillia aged 88, survived by his wife, Cathy, son Nicholas, stepchildren James and Christine Bryant, daughter-in-law Pam Downham Heaven and grandsons Sebastian and Isaac. His son Christopher predeceased him in 2007. His sister Anne Griffith and her family, sister-in-law Elizabeth Littler and brother-in-law Tom Neelands also survived him.