Dennis Edward Elgar was a general practitioner whose last address was in Deal, Kent. He was born on 23 August 1939 in Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex, the son of Ronald Geoffrey Elgar, a builders’ merchant, and Ruby Lilian May Elgar née Waller, a nurse. His sister Gillian was a nurse at the Westminster Hospital during his training there. He attended Bexhill Grammar School and then went on to Selwyn College, Cambridge with an exhibition, and Westminster Hospital Medical School for his clinical studies, where he won a prize in surgery and certificates of merit in forensic medicine and public health. At medical school, his greatest influences were Gerald Westbury and Harold Ellis. He was a house officer in medicine and surgery and a resident medical officer at the Westminster Hospital, then a senior house officer in the accident and emergency department at Balham Hospital. He then became a senior house officer in surgery at Kingston and Hammersmith. He was finally a surgical registrar at the Westminster and St Stephen’s hospitals. He gained his FRCS in 1967. In 1969 he decided to become a general practitioner. He went on to gain diplomas in family planning and vasectomy. Outside medicine he was interested in ballroom dancing. He was a qualified teacher, an associate of the Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing (AISTD), and had no failures among his exam candidates. He was single. Elgar died on 19 April 2018 in Deal, Kent and left a large legacy to Selwyn College, Cambridge ‘for the benefit of less-well-off students’.