Hugo Lorenz Obwegeser was internationally recognised as the father of modern orthognathic surgery who initiated huge advances in the development of plastic surgery of the facial skeleton. He was born on 21 October 1920 in Hohenems, Austria and initially graduated in medicine at Innsbruck. In 1945 he attended the Rockitansky Institute of Pathological Anatomy at the University of Vienna and studied pathology under Hermann Chiari – a man whom he always acknowledged as a highly influential teacher. From there he moved to Graz and trained in oral and maxillofacial surgery for six years, where his mentor was Richard Trauner. Building on this experience of dealing with war time injuries, he spent 5 months in the UK with Sir Harold Gillies in Basingstoke from October 1951 to February 1952 and also joined Eduard Schmidt in Stuttgart for a while. Appointed to the staff of the department of surgery at the University of Zurich in a fairly junior position, he rapidly rose through the ranks and was appointed a personal chair in 1962. By the time he retired he was professor of oral and maxillofacial surgery at the medical school and professor of oral and maxillofacial surgery, oral pathology and oral diagnosis at the dental school. When he began his research, orthognathic surgery was merely a subspecialty of oral surgery. The ground breaking procedures he introduced were notable not only in their effectiveness, but also because they were carried out via intraoral incisions thus leaving no facial scarring. He pioneered the sagittal split osteotomy in 1953 on two patients with a sagittal plane of fracture of the mandibular ramus. Four years later, in 1957, he undertook the first osseous genoplasty on a living patient. A further innovation was the development of what was known as the Le Fort I osteotomy of the maxilla which he described in 1965 and in 1970 he published a description of the first bimaxillary osteotomy. Later, in 1986, he published an important classification of mandibular asymmetry. He lectured widely on his innovative procedures, including a memorable three day lecture series at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington DC in 1966. Working with fellow craniofacial surgeons all over the world, he developed particularly fruitful relationships with Paul Tessier in Paris and Norman Rowe in the UK. Many aspiring surgeons visited his unit which came to be referred to as the ‘Zurich School’ of cranio-maxillofacial surgery. He published extensively and was on the editorial panels of several important journals. A member of many professional organisations, he was at one time president of the German Society of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery and of the European Association of Maxillofacial Surgery. Having retired from his academic posts in 1987, he continued his research and an article written by him was published in the *Journal of Craniomaxillofacial surgery* in the month in which he passed away. On 2 September 2017 he died at the age of 96 in Schwerzenbach, Switzerland. He was survived by Luise, his wife of almost 70 years, six children, 17 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.