David Evans was a much admired general and vascular surgeon in Shrewsbury who became well known nationally in the latter part of his career for being in the forefront of hernia repair by minimal access surgery. He performed more than 2,600 such operations, giving a Hunterian lecture on his experience in 2001. David was perhaps born to be a surgeon, both parents being surgeons. His father, Evan Stanley Evans, was an orthopaedic surgeon with a special interest in children’s surgery who later became the medical superintendent at Lord Mayor Treloar Hospital. His mother, Muriel Gordon Evans née Henderson, also trained as an orthopaedic surgeon but later undertook child care and school clinics. He attended Kingswood House School in Epsom and then Charterhouse. In the school holidays, from the age of 14, he assisted his father in the operating theatre, learning to tie surgical knots, removing skin staples and simple suturing, and in 1953 proceeded to St Thomas’s Hospital Medical School, qualifying in 1959. After house jobs, there followed a broad surgical training at St Peter’s Hospital, Chertsey, Hammersmith Hospital, Great Ormond Street Hospital and in Chelmsford, before he returned to St Thomas’ as a registrar, having become a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1963. A period of research under the direction of Frank Cockett led to his MS thesis in 1970 titled ‘Thombo-embolism and the diagnosis of deep vein thrombosis by ultrasound’ and a Hunterian Lecture on the same subject published in the *Annals* (‘The early diagnosis of thromboembolism by ultrasound’ *Ann R Coll Surg Engl*. 1971 Oct;49[4]:225-49). Extensive training in vascular surgery during his senior registrar years at St Thomas’ led, in 1974, to a very busy consultant appointment in Shrewsbury as a general and vascular surgeon. Throughout his consultant career David was a true general surgeon but with a special interest in peripheral vascular surgery. In 1990, he was one of the first British surgeons to practice minimal invasive surgery, initially on gallbladders, but quite soon extending his expertise to laparoscopic repair of hernias. It was in this area that he rapidly established a national reputation, publishing widely on his experience (for example, ‘Day-case laparoscopic hernia repair’ *Br J Surg*. 1996 Oct;83[10]:1361-3) and being a teacher on national training programmes. In 2001, the first year of his retirement, he collated his experience of 2,600 repairs in 1,900 patients in a Hunterian lecture entitled ‘Laparoscopic transabdominal pre-peritoneal (TAPP) repair of groin hernia: one surgeon’s experience of a developing technique’, published in the *Annals* (*Ann R Coll Surg Engl*. 2002 Nov;84[6]:393-8). Soon after his retirement, David moved to Dorset, where he took an active part in village life while pursuing his interests of golf and bridge. Sadly, he had the misfortune to require several orthopaedic operations, a heart operation and a frightening attack of Guillain-Barré syndrome, from all of which he made a full recovery. In 2017, he published an entertaining account of his life *A nurtured passion: a surgeon’s life in two halves – open and closed* (lulu.com). Married in 1968 to Mary, a St Thomas’ nurse, they had four children – Katie, James, Charlotte and Sarah, the last entering the medical profession. David Evans died of renal failure on 17 November 2019, aged 84.