Maurice King was a reader in the department of community medicine and general practice at the University of Leeds, but he was known for a series of books on surgery, which aimed to provide all the information a non-specialist doctor would need, particularly those working in remote areas in the developing world. King was born in Hatton, Ceylon on 7 February 1927, to Hugh Christopher King, a colonial forestry officer, and Eleanor Lilian King née De Winton. He returned to England for his education, at Arnold House in north Wales and Uppingham School in Rutland. Despite a disrupted early education, he became a foundation scholar at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He studied medicine at St Thomas’ Hospital and after two years working as a pathologist at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, he took a post as a pathologist in Northern Rhodesia. In 1962 he took a job as a lecturer at Makerere College in Uganda. It was here that he found his vocation as a writer, when he did locum cover for a friend at a mission hospital in Amudat, in the country’s remote northeast. He found he didn’t have the knowledge and skills to treat the range of patients he saw, and no written resources existed to help him. It was, he wrote, ‘an empty space on the bookshelves of the world … that badly wanted filling’. He convened a symposium at Makerere, inviting experts to share their knowledge, and edited the resulting book, *Medical care in developing countries: a primer on the medicine of poverty and a symposium from Makerere* (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1967). This sold over 50,000 copies, but King never accepted royalties on his books, to keep the prices low and maximise their reach and impact. His work took him to the University of Zambia in 1967, where he was the professor of social medicine, and then to Indonesia in 1972, where he worked for the World Health Organization. Whilst there, his two sons were born, and he wrote two books on primary childcare with his wife Felicity (née Savage), also a doctor. Funded by the German aid agency Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ), he moved to the Nyeri Provincial General Hospital in Kenya in 1979 to start work on the four-volume series covering primary surgery, non-trauma, trauma, primary anaesthesia, primary mother care and population. In 1984 he took up a post in public health medicine at the University of Leeds and spent five years combining writing with his teaching work. The books were written with the assistance of a number of surgeons from around the world – most notably James Cairns of St Francis’ Hospital, Katete in Zambia and Peter Bewes, who worked in Uganda and Tanzania, and spent their holidays in Kenya working with King. Sir Michael Wood, who co-founded the Flying Doctors Service in East Africa, had started work on a similar manual – and passed on his uncompleted manuscript to King. King described his own role as a ‘knowledge engineer’, gathering the combined expertise of skilled surgeons, organising it, and setting it down in clear, simple English. It was such a huge task that if he had tried to combine it with practising as a surgeon, he would never have completed the books. ‘I am thus the scribe and servant of many skilled surgeons. It is they, not me, that speak to you through these pages,’ he wrote in the preface to the book on non-trauma. ‘Nevertheless, in the theatre and the wards, I share the pain, the anxiety, and the wretchedness of so many of your patients, and your joy in caring for them.’ The books became standard reference works at hospitals across the developing world and are still in use. An electronic edition of the book on non-trauma, published in 2016, has been downloaded nearly a million times. King would often receive letters from practising doctors saying how much they appreciated his work. In recognition of his work on these books, he was made a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1993. He felt it was a doctor’s role to consider all the threats to human health, whether it be war, or climate change and ecological degradation. In Africa he saw the impact that rapidly rising populations had on families’ ability to feed themselves. He spent much of his retirement writing about what he called ‘demographic entrapment’, and campaigning for the world to discuss more openly the challenges of population growth, especially in Africa. One of his great passions was woodwork, in his youth, creating furniture, and when older, mending that which others had discarded, concerned about the waste our consumer society creates. He often wore clothes that he had repaired himself. He died on 14 August 2024 at the age of 97. He was survived by his wife and his son Ben, a journalist at the BBC. His oldest son, Dominic, predeceased him.