Julian Sansom was a consultant general surgeon at the James Paget University Hospital, Great Yarmouth, Norfolk. He was born in London, the son of Stanley Robert Sansom and Marian Isabel Sansom née Naylor and did his medical training at St Thomas’s Hospital Medical School. After house jobs, he spent a year as a medical officer in the Antarctic and there are two small islands named in his honour. Later he was a surgical registrar on the renal unit at Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham, before becoming a senior surgical registrar on the professorial unit there. He was appointed as a consultant surgeon with a special interest in urology to the Great Yarmouth and Waveney Health District in 1980, at the age of 40, which led to the development of an excellent urological service with the assistance of his three colleagues. He had a special interest in endocrine surgery and did most of the operations on parathyroids. Without doubt he was the fastest operator on the east coast. Initially he was based in Lowestoft but πtransferred most of his sessions to the new district hospital when it opened in December 1981. He continued an out-patient clinic in Lowestoft for many years. He was a district surgical tutor for the Royal College of Surgeons of England from 1981 to 1992. He was chair of the surgical division and chair of the medical staff committee. He was the first clinical director of the surgical division and served on multiple committees. He was also an honorary lecturer at Cambridge University Medical School. Among his publications was ‘Results of 250 consecutive cadaver kidney transplants’, published in the *British Medical Journal* in 1976 (*Br Med J*. 1976 Mar 6;1[6009]:547-50). He retired in February 2005, at the age of 65, and devoted his time to gardening, carpentry, reading history and cosmological theory. In his later years he suffered from pulmonary fibrosis. Julian Sansom was a quiet and modest man who was married to Catherine (née Gill): they had a son, Nathan, and a daughter, Naomi. He died suddenly at his home on 29 December 2022 of a presumed heart attack.