Madhira (Mike) Dasarhadi Ram, the son of Madhira Ram, an advocate, and of Madduri Lakshmi Bai Ram, was born at Visakhapatnam, India, on 6 April 1935. His medical education was at Andrha Medical College, Visakhapatnam, where he took a BSc in 1952 and graduated in medicine in 1957. He won a number of prizes during his student years and was awarded the Major Ebden Gold Medal in the MS. After his early resident appointments he became a lecturer in surgery at Andhra 1961-64. He then held the Barry Trust Scholarship for studies in the UK at the Postgraduate Medical School and Guy's before spending a year as tutor in surgery to the professorial unit at Glasgow Royal Infirmary. From 1966 to 1969 he was a surgical tutor at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School, where he did postgraduate work in vascular surgery and renal transplantation, and then became Assistant Clinical Professor of Surgery and Professor of Experimental Pathology at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, when he worked at Mount Sinai Hospital. From 1977 to 1980 he was Associate Professor of Surgery at the University of Kentucky, being chief of the division of surgery during the last year, and having also worked as associate chief of staff for education at the Veterans Administration Medical Center. In 1980 he was appointed Professor of Surgery at the University of Kentucky Medical Center, Lexington. From 1960 onwards he published many papers in the English and American literature on a wide variety of subjects, including renal, urological, thyroid and biliary matters, and he also contributed to a number of textbooks. He was very active in surgical education and devised many surgical quizzes which were published in the Hospital physician, New York. The Dean at Kentucky University recorded his admiration for Dr Ram's very high standards of clinical care. His hobbies included foreign travel, stamp and coin collecting. However, the last few years of his life were marked by serious health problems. In 1985 he had a heart transplant and eventually died of heart failure four years later. He married Noreen Mary Gearon, an English nurse, in 1967, and they had three sons and a daughter. When he died on 28 September 1988, he was survived by his wife and children, Ravi, Ian, Chandra and Colin.