Keith Paterson Abel, son of the distinguished surgeon Lawrence Abel FRCS and Margaret Russell Paterson MD MRCP was born on 31 July 1926. He was educated at Rugby and Upper Canada College, Toronto, and then at Trinity College, Cambridge. After the Natural Science Tripos he went to St Mary's Hospital for his clinical training and qualified in 1950. He was house surgeon to R M Handfield-Jones and Lord Porritt. He was demonstrator in anatomy at St Mary's in the spring of 1951 before doing his National Service in the RNVR, during which he skied for the Royal Navy. Following release from the Navy he worked for his Fellowship, while doing posts in accident and emergency surgery at the Radcliffe Infirmary, where he worked with Walpole Lewin on head injuries. Later he worked at the Royal Marsden Hospital and Southend General Hospital, where he was resident surgical officer and worked for Rodney Maingot. Abel obtained his Fellowship in 1955 and became senior registrar to Arthur Dickson Wright at St Mary's. After gaining the MChir in Cambridge in 1958 he won the Peter Gorham Research Fellowship to Harvard Medical School in 1959, where he studied the isolation and perfusion of both limbs and organs, and the homotransplantation of whole organs. This work was continued when he returned to St Mary's as senior registrar to Felix Eastcott. After two years he went on to the West Middlesex Hospital until he was appointed consultant general surgeon to the Prince of Wales and St Ann's Hospitals, Tottenham, in 1964. When the Prince of Wales closed he moved to the North Middlesex Hospital, where he continued to work until his retirement. His surgical interests were varied, and included colon and breast surgery; he also ran a very successful clinic for the treatment of varicose veins. He was the author of numerous publications on a wide variety of topics, and he devised an operative choledochoscope. Outside medicine Abel had many interests, and was particularly devoted to field sports - he had his own game farm and raised English partridges. He was fond of skiing and sailing, and enjoyed wind-surfing, which he took up at the age of 55. Abel was married twice. In 1957 he married Sally Anne O'Callaghan, by whom he had three sons, James, Andrew and Keith, and a daughter, Kathryn Mary, who followed her father into medicine. In 1982 he married Susan Margaret Podmore. Whilst out shooting on 5 November he suffered a massive subdural haemorrhage from which he did not recover consciousness, and he died on 12 November 1994.