Norman A Matheson ‘NAM’ was a consultant general surgeon at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary. Born on 26 March 1932 in Inverness, he was the son of Allan John Matheson and Margaret Ann Matheson née Mutch. He grew up on Avonside in the shadow of the Cairngorm Mountains and his early education was in Tomintoul, the highest village in the UK, where his mother was the district nurse. His secondary education was as a boarder at Robert Gordon’s College in Aberdeen. During these formative years he developed a lifelong affinity with the culture and pursuits of the mountains and rivers of the north of Scotland. He was fond of field sports, stalked deer, fished for salmon, and excelled at playing the highland bagpipes. He graduated MB ChB from the University of Aberdeen in 1956 and his potential was recognised by Tom Morgan, an academic physician who introduced him to laboratory research. He admired and adopted Morgan’s acerbic demolition of pomposity and self-importance, a trait Norman was later to exhibit, albeit in a more restrained manner, at conferences attended by the ‘great and good’ of British surgery. The arrival of Hugh Dudley as a senior lecturer in surgery at the University of Aberdeen in 1958 coincided with and was influential in Norman’s change to a career in surgery. His subsequent scientific rigour, intellectual honesty, meticulous clinical care and surgical skills were profoundly influenced by Dudley’s iconoclastic, demanding persona. Within five years of graduation Norman had acquired the fellowships of both the Royal Colleges of Surgeons of Edinburgh and of England and was appointed as a lecturer/senior registrar. At a time when progress to consultancy in general surgery was often measured in decades, Norman was appointed as a senior lecturer/honorary consultant to the Grampian Health Board in 1964, only eight years after graduation. He developed a productive research programme in haemorrheology, renal pathophysiology, platelet function and dextran pharmacology in collaboration with Pharmacia AB in Uppsala, Sweden and gained his ChM in 1965. A stream of Aberdeen surgical trainees benefited from clinical and laboratory research fellowships with secondments to Uppsala under his guidance. Although Norman was a senior lecturer for only three years, 10 trainees acquired higher degrees under his supervision. This was a period of frequent scientific publications, and he was particularly proud of three papers published in *Nature*. His clinical practice developed rapidly and accelerated in 1967 when he was appointed as a consultant general surgeon at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary. He combined excellence in clinical decision making with technical ability. Applying the principles of a clear surgical plan, economy of movement in operating, optimisation of instrumentation, precision in dissection and reconstruction achieved outstanding results in every area of abdominal surgery. His philosophy of obsessional attention to detail, haemostasis and making operations a repetitive and consistent routine attracted a team of outstanding loyal theatre staff and in many eyes elevated surgery to an art form. It was at this time he developed the elegant technique of appositional single layer sutured serosubmucosal (or extramucosal) anastomosis in the GI tract, which became a de facto standard in surgical courses in the UK. The serendipitous discovery of the benefit of tetracycline lavage for the treatment and prophylaxis of peritoneal and wound infection was widely acclaimed and associated with the lowest infection rates ever reported in the UK literature in abdominal surgery. The low sepsis rates were also attributable to the consistent application of a routine ‘bundle’ of actions 40 years, before the term came into common currency. During the 70s he showed that using his anastomotic technique rectal cancers could be treated with restorative surgery without ‘protective’ proximal stomas with a clinical leak rate of 2% at a time when clinical leak rates of 25% were not uncommon. The same technique was applied with comparable success throughout the GI tract. He combined surgical virtuosity with scientific rigour, best demonstrated in a randomised clinical trial of operations for duodenal ulcer. His commitment to quality assurance and audit led to the early encouragement of computerisation for prospective data collection and analysis. In the latter half of the 20th century a general surgeon’s operative repertoire was influenced by ability rather than sub-specialty interest and Norman’s practice included complex upper and lower GI, pancreatic and hepatobiliary surgery, including liver resections. After the retirement of Bill Michie in 1976, he added endocrine surgery for the north east of Scotland to his portfolio. Always open to innovation, he introduced and critically evaluated the role of aspiration cytology in thyroid swellings and risk-based management of thyroid cancer. He was chairman of the regional and higher surgical training committees for many years and took a major interest in the trainees’ progress. Operative teaching was by demonstration rather than supervision from the other side of the table, but the many higher surgical trainees from outside Aberdeen who engineered an attachment with NAM was testament to the value of working in his team. He was a hard taskmaster and expected the highest standards from a small clinical team who thrived on the challenge. Norman carefully crafted and rehearsed lectures, exemplified by two which stand out in memory. The excoriating critique of private practice in his oration to the Aberdeen Medico-Chirurgical Society obliged him to abandon this activity and in part explains the bimodal pattern of his research output, with peaks in the early and late periods of his clinical career. The Bill Michie memorial lecture for the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh was a heartfelt tribute to a friend and colleague. These stand out not for just for their quality but the effect they had on him personally. Norman suffered from bi-polar mental ill health, characterised by infrequent but profound episodes of depression. Major events could trigger these and at times he felt he could not continue in surgery. However, with the support of family and colleagues, he weathered these storms, although they did influence his decision to retire at the age of 60 in 1992. Freed of his clinical commitment, Norman’s talents as a polymath flourished over the next 25 years. An accomplished watercolourist in his own right, he had in 1985 discerned the potential for art to enhance the hospital environment and founded and chaired for 14 years the Grampian Hospitals Art Trust. By the time he stepped down this had become ‘the most impressive collection of quality art in any hospital or health authority throughout the UK’, in recognition of which he was awarded an MBE. Gardening became an absorbing interest tackled with characteristic commitment. He turned two acres of rough woodland into an award-winning garden containing 600 rhododendrons, unusual trees and woodland plants. As a young piper competing at Highland gatherings, he had caught the eye of one of the ‘Bobs of Balmoral’. The ‘Bobs’ were a ghillie and stalker employed on the royal estate and legendary bagpipe players. Under Bob Nicol’s tutelage Norman subsequently won the gold medal at the Royal Scottish Pipers Society. He studiously recorded Bob’s interpretation of tunes on a weighty but fortunately high quality tape-to-tape recorder and in retirement digitised the material. This was subsequently recorded on a set of ten CDs, which have become an international reference source for good pibroch playing. He was a senior judge at major piping competitions and his contribution over 40 years was recognised by a presentation from the Prince of Wales. He was a deer stalker since his teenage years, an accomplished salmon fisherman and master of the Spey cast. He combined his talents for creative writing and illustration in the publication of two books; *A Speyside odyssey: a natural history of the Atlantic salmon* (Matador, 2019) with a foreword by the Prince of Wales and *Speyside memories: boyhood and beyond on river and hill* (Matador, 2020), comprising affectionate reminiscences. Some of the latter will be familiar to those who worked with him because he was fond of wide-ranging staff room conversation and was an entertaining raconteur. These books were published despite a spate of ill health in his later years. He was compiling material for another book before his final admission to hospital. Norman died on 10 January 2022 of sepsis resulting from a colovesical fistula. He was 89. Predeceased by his wife Helen (née Grant) and son Malcolm, he was survived by his daughters Catriona and Fiona.