Donald Ross (surgeon)

Donald Nixon Ross, FRCS (4 October 1922 – 7 July 2014) was a South African-born British thoracic surgeon who was a pioneer of cardiac surgery and led the team that carried out the first heart transplantation in the United Kingdom in 1968. More significantly, he developed the pulmonary autograft, known as the Ross procedure, for treatment of aortic valve disease. Ross was born in Kimberley, South Africa, on 4 October 1922. He died in London on 7 July 2014.

Ross was born of Scottish parents in Kimberley in South Africa, where he was educated, matriculating from Kimberley Boys' High School in 1939.He died in London on 7 July 2014

He began his medical career enrolling as a student at the University of Cape Town, training first as a dedicated scientist and subsequently as a doctor. He graduated (BSc, MB, ChB) in 1946 with first-class honours and the university gold medal. He had also received a two-year overseas scholarship which allowed him to further his studies in the United Kingdom.

Ross has recalled eagerly accepting the scholarship: once in England he took up a career in surgery and became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons (1949) within two years instead of the usual three. Working initially in Bristol he focused on chest and oesophageal surgery, and then began to include early cardiac surgery, such as on the ductus arteriosus. He was appointed Senior Registrar in Thoracic Surgery, Bristol, in 1952.

Ross acknowledges the particular influence on his career of two key figures: Ronald Belsey, MD, and Russell Claude Brock, FRCS, FRCP (later Lord Brock). Ross has recorded how Belsey, the oesophageal surgeon in Bristol with whom he was working, took him to Guy's Hospital in London to see Sir Russell Brock attempt to split open a calcified aortic valve. "There was no open-heart surgery in those days, and the operation was a dramatic failure. But the drama involved convinced me that I had to study new developments in cardiac surgery."

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