Lasalle Doheny Leffall was born on 22 May 1930 in Tallahassee, Florida. His father, a teacher from Texas, was principal of a racially segregated high school in Quincy, Florida and that was where he grew up. From an early age he was keen to study medicine – he has said that this ambition began when he treated a wounded bird as a child. He finished high school at the age of 15 and enrolled at the Florida Agriculture and Mechanical University in Tallahassee which was, at that time, a Black university. On graduating *summa cum laude* at the age of 18 in 1948, he commenced to study medicine at Howard University College of Medicine in Washington, DC. Passing his MD with distinction in 1952, he held various training posts at the Homer G. Phillips Hospital, St. Louis, Missouri, the D.C. General Hospital, the Freedmen’s Hospital and, lastly, the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. There followed a year of military service as chief of general surgery at the US Army Hospital in Munich, Germany, from 1960 to 1961, with the rank of captain. He then returned to Howard University and joined the faculty as an assistant professor, advancing academically until he became chairman of the department of surgery in 1970, a post he held for 25 years. In 1992 he was appointed the Charles R. Drew professor – the chair being named after a pioneering African American surgeon. He ceased operating in 2005 although he still attended surgical rounds and continued practicing medicine until 2013. Indeed, at the age of 85, he was still active in his field. The study of cancer was throughout his career his major preoccupation and particularly as it affected African- Americans. In 1979 he inaugurated the first programme to investigate the increasing incidence and mortality of cancer in this group and its implications for similar studies in other racial and ethnic minorities. He was the first African American president of the American Cancer Society in 1979 and of the American College of Surgeons in 1995. A visiting professor and guest lecturer at over 200 medical institutions in the USA and overseas, he was known as an eloquent speaker. He also wrote or contributed to over 100 books and journal articles. He married Ruth née McWilliams during his time as a senior at Howard University and they had one son, LaSalle Leffall III, who became a businessman. A jazz fan, he was close friends with the musician Cannonball Adderley. In 2005 he published an autobiography *No boundaries: a cancer surgeon’s odyssey* (Washington, DC. Howard University Press, 2005). On 25 May 2019 he died of cancer aged 89 and was survived by his wife, son and sister Dolores.