Douglas Malcolm Millar was a consultant general surgeon in Colchester, Essex. He was born in Mill Hill, London, the son of Gordon Millar, a GP, and Ivy Muriel Millar née How, a housewife. In 1931 Gordon gave up his practice in Mill Hill to move to Tottenham, north London, to take over the GP practice of his father, William Millar, who had died. The Millar family remained in Tottenham, with the exception of the early war years, until 1948. During the Blitz, Douglas lived with his mother, godmother, aunt, brother and sister near Welwyn, while his father stayed in London running his mobile surgical ambulance throughout the Blitz, ably supported by his retriever, appropriately named Sandbags. Doulgas’ early schooling was in London then at age 13 he went to Aldenham School, Radlett, where he played cricket and hockey and was school captain. In 1946, somewhat inevitably given his family background, Douglas left school to read medicine at King’s College, London, and then went to St George’s Hospital at Hyde Park Corner to complete the MB BS. Whilst training at King’s and St George’s clearly took priority, he also played a great deal of sport, particularly hockey and cricket. He captained a combined London Universities and United Hospitals hockey team on a tour to Germany, the first post-war British hockey team to tour Germany. Incorrectly billed in Frankfurt as Great Britain vs Germany, they played in front of a ‘vociferous’ large crowd. It was an enjoyable tour, but sometimes quite challenging for a 20-year-old – for example, in speeches at a formal reception he was asked by the mayor of Frankfurt to explain why civilian districts had been targeted in the war; and he also stayed with the family of a former U-boat commander. He qualified in 1951 and then spent a year at St George’s doing medicine, surgery and then casualty. In 1953 he decided to carry out his National Service in the Navy, following his father, and joined the new destroyer, *HMS Defender*, as a surgeon lieutenant. Their first duty was to take part in the royal review of the fleet at Spithead after the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. The next day they sailed for Japanese and Korean waters, where for the next 18 months he was the sole medical officer for a crew of more than 250 as they patrolled the Korean, Hong Kong, Chinese and Malaysian coasts during latter stages of the Korean War and then beyond the armistice. His many exploits included helping locals/police on small boat sorties into Hong Kong to treat locals, chasing pirates in the straits of Formosa (similar to his father’s exploits in 1919), accompanying fully armed, combat boarding parties – as medical officer, dressed in tropical whites – and various other outings, before *HMS Defender* steamed up the Johor river to support the Army ‘clearing out the last of the communists’ as part of the Malayan Emergency. He saw much pathology through doing clinics in many different places. There were also opportunities to play cricket and hockey whilst in Hong Kong, and other highlights included being given the controls of a Sunderland flying boat on a RAF patrol on the west coast of Korea (he had flown a Tiger Moth at school) and, at the age of 25, returning home in late 1954 on a troopship, performing an appendicectomy on a sailor in the middle of the Indian Ocean. After National Service, he returned to St George’s to pursue surgical training, working on the surgical and thoracic units, being an anatomy prosector at the Royal College of Surgeons of England and a registrar at the London Hospital and Black Notley Hospital near Braintree. He passed the fellowships of the Royal Colleges of Surgeons of England and of Edinburgh in 1958. In 1960 he became a senior registrar at St George’s and worked in a number of specialties including paediatric surgery, plastic surgery, breast and thyroid surgery, urology, vascular surgery and, latterly, coloproctology with Sir Ralph Marnham and Bryan Brooke. He also spent a year at the Royal Hampshire County Hospital in Winchester, where several St George’s senior registrars had worked. He met his wife, Sally (née Bilcliffe) in 1957 when she was working in outpatients; she became the youngest ward sister St George’s had had. They were married in 1960 after Douglas came back from a six-week tour of the Middle East (Iran, Iraq, Jordan and Cyprus) as an assistant surgeon to Victor Riddell, organised by the British Council to operate and lecture. They had three children, Malcolm, Clare and James. In 1967, he was appointed as a consultant surgeon to the St Helena Hospital Group in Colchester, Essex, with beds and operating sessions at the Essex County Hospital, and Black Notley Hospital at Braintree, where he had been a registrar when training at the London Hospital. He also had out-patient clinics at Halstead and Clacton. It was a typical district general hospital covering a large area with a population of 250,000 and only four general surgeons and he quickly established himself as a competent general surgeon with particular interests in breast surgery, colorectal problems and vascular work. He was a brave surgeon and would take on anything that needed to be done. His particular contributions were in breast surgery, where he realised that segmental excision followed by radiotherapy was appropriate management for many patients and avoided the cosmetic results of the more radical traditional surgery. He kept records of 130 patients treated in this way. Also, at that time the radiotherapy unit in Colchester had adopted the Manchester Selectron radiotherapy treatment for some gynaecological cancers, causing significant problems of bowel, bladder and pelvic damage from the radiation. A number of patients had very troublesome fistulae and Douglas recognised this as a complication and was instrumental in stopping the treatment. He also created a uro-ileostomy procedure which bypassed the fistula and considerably helped these patients; he wrote about it and presented his results nationally and abroad. Douglas was president of the coloproctology section and a member of the council of the Royal Society of Medicine, president of the Colchester Medical Society in 1974, president of the St Mark’s Hospital Association, a fellow of the Association of Surgeons of Great Britain and Ireland, an honorary surgical tutor at the Charing Cross and Westminster hospitals and a surgical tutor for the Royal College of Surgeons of England in the north east Essex hospitals region. After he retired in 1992, he served on medical tribunals as an expert witness in the east of England area. He was always a keen sportsman, being a good cricketer and hockey player when younger. He had been captain of London University Hockey from 1947 to 1949. He also played first XI hockey for Hampshire, Surrey, Middlesex and Hertfordshire, the East of England, the Anglo Scots and for Scotland, for whom he won a cap against Wales in 1956. He played cricket for United Hospitals to minor counties level, and in Colchester played into his fifties, playing for the Gentlemen of Essex and captaining the Hoboes Cricket Club for three years, touring Belgium and Holland. He was an extremely competitive sportsman in all he did. Along with golf and painting, he continued his sailing throughout his retirement, racing in local and North Sea races, and in later years cruising the east coast widely, as well as the Mediterranean with old friends. Above all, he was a devoted family man. Sally predeceased him in August 2023, and while his health deteriorated after that, he was able to stay at home and was looked after by his children and devoted carers. He died on 1 February 2024 aged 94 and was survived by his children and seven grandchildren.