Somewhat above middle height, clean-shaven with prematurely white hair and of ascetic appearance, Cecil Beadles was unmarried and lived for his garden and the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons. He was so excessively shy that he was rarely seen even by his colleagues unless they went to look for him in the work-rooms or the museum of the College. He was born in 1867, the son of Hubert Beadles, of Southgate, and thus came of a family of general practitioners, some of whom practised in Forest Hill and others at New Southgate, when both were villages which had not yet become engulfed by the suburbs of London. He was educated at University College, where he won the gold medal for histology in 1885 and became known to S G Shattock, then curator of the museum. He qualified MRCS and LRCP in 1890 and must soon have recognized his unfitness to deal with private patients, for his shyness made him brusque in manner and address. He was house surgeon at the Cancer Hospital for a short time and from 1892 until 1906 was assistant medical officer at the London County Asylum, Colney Hatch. Here he did good scientific work and contributed articles to *The Lancet* as early as 1891, 2, 754 and 1892, 2, 1159, showed cases at the Pathological Society and wrote in the *Journal of Mental Science*, work which led to the award of a prize by the Medico-psychological Association in 1894 for his dissertation entitled "The degenerative lesions of the arterial system in the insane". He resigned his post at Colney Hatch in 1906 and became an unofficial worker at the Royal College of Surgeons, where his value was recognized by S G Shattock, the pathological curator. In 1908 he was a Hunterian professor of surgery and pathology, and in October 1909 he was appointed to assist Shattock in selecting, arranging, and cataloguing specimens in the museum to illustrate the main principles of general pathology. His energy, foresight, orderliness, and excellent technique, aided by the wide philosophic outlook of Professor Shattock, completed "for the first time", as Sir Arthur Keith wrote, "a work written not in words but in illustrative specimens, a complete and systematic treatise on general pathology". From 1916 onwards Beadles was engaged in arranging and describing the Army medical war collection of pathological and other specimens. The work occupied him, with the help of T W P Lawrence, FRCS, until 1921, when the preparations were entrusted by the War Office to the keeping of the College. The College recognized his services in 1927, when he was elected FRCS without examination. He was appointed pathological curator when Shattock died in 1925, and from then onwards was engaged in the never-ending task of making a new descriptive catalogue of the pathological specimens in the museum together with the examination and description of those which are being constantly added. He died on 3 January 1933 at Gresham House, Egham, and was buried at Englefield Green. It may fairly be said of Beadles that he was in the true line of succession of those who built up the pathological side of the Hunterian Museum: Clift, Paget, Doran, Goodhart, Targett, and Shattock; more he would not have wished.