Lakshman Sujeeva Attygalle was born on 11 June 1933 in Colombo, Ceylon. His father was Sir Nicholas Attygalle, a qualified obstetrician and gynaecologist who became president of the senate, the upper house of the Ceylon parliament, and later vice chancellor of the University of Ceylon. Sir Nicholas was the first ENT surgeon in Sri Lanka as well as the first obstetrician and gynaecologist. Unusually for that time, both father and son were fellows of the college. There was a long history of medicine in the family, his great grandfather, John Attyygalle, had been the first Sinhalese to qualify in Western medicine and, further back, there were distinguished indigenous medical professionals and hela veda healers from Madapatha. His mother, Lady Conyta Nanerl Charlotte Clare Attygalle, was the daughter of the Ceylonese deputy inspector general of police and his older sister, Anula, later married and acquired the surname, Wijensinha. After attending the Royal Primary School in Colombo, Lakshman progressed to Royal College, Ceylon University, graduating MB, BS in 1958 with first class honours and a gold medal. From 1958 to 1959 he was a house officer at the General Hospital (GHC) in Colombo, working with the eminent surgeon Clifford Misso, a fellow of the college. He passed the fellowship of the college in 1963 and worked again at the GHC as resident surgeon from 1965 before visiting the UK with a Smith and Nephew scholarship and working in Liverpool with the urological surgeon Norman Gibbon. On his return to Ceylon in 1968 he set up a urology unit at the Kandy General Hospital, the first such unit outside Colombo. Moving back to the GHC in 1972, he took charge of their unit, constantly expanding and developing its services until his retirement in 1993. He carried out pioneering work on minimally invasive transurethral bladder and prostatic surgery and several thousand procedures for urinary stones and cancers. From 1980 his surgical practice was combined with postgraduate teaching in urology at the Postgraduate Institute of Medicine. He was president of the College of Surgeons of Sri Lanka from 1992 to 1993 and a council member and honorary fellow of the Sri Lanka Association of Urological Surgeons. Outside medicine he enjoyed swimming and animal husbandry and was a gregarious and sociable man. He was on the board of trustees of the Singhalese Sports Club. A practising Buddhist, he was keen to ensure that all members of society had access to good healthcare. He married Deepthi née Mendis in 1964; she was also medically qualified and became a consultant anaesthesiologist and fellow of the faculty of anaesthetists at the college. She survived him when he died at home on 18 May 2019, along with their children Priyan, an executive at American Express Bank, Saudi Arabia, Ayoma, who was a consultant pathologist at the Royal Marsden Hospital in London and Amila, who was an attorney.