Douglas Robertson was a consultant general surgeon at the Royal Hospital, Sheffield. He was born in London in 1919 of Scottish parents. His father, Falconer Robertson, was a banker, and his mother, Jane Mary Duff, was a teacher. Douglas was educated at the Stationers’ Company School. He entered St Bartholomew’s Hospital at the age of 17 in 1936, being interviewed by Sir William Girling Ball. He passed the Primary at the age of 20 and qualified in 1942, winning the gold medal in obstetrics and the Brackenbury prize in surgery. He was invited by Sir James Patterson Ross to be his house surgeon on the professorial unit, but Douglas had already joined the Royal Navy and soon found himself as a surgeon lieutenant on Arctic convoys. Later he was posted to Ceylon with the Fleet Air Arm. He returned to Bart’s in 1946 and at once became interested in the new specialty of vascular surgery. He was appointed second assistant to Sir Edward Tuckwell in 1947 and chief assistant to the surgical unit under Ross in 1950. Having won a travelling fellowship, he took the opportunity to visit the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Eric Hüsfeldt in Copenhagen and Sir James Learmonth in Edinburgh. He was a Hunterian Professor at the College in 1954. He was finally appointed consultant surgeon to the Royal Hospital, Sheffield in 1955. At the Royal Hospital he continued to practise a wide range of general surgery and to build up a large practice. He was secretary and later president of the Moynihan Club, and was a moving figure in establishing St Luke’s Hospice, under the aegis of Dame Cicely Saunders, the first such hospice to be set up in the provinces. He married Alison Duncombe, née Bateman, a medical social worker and had two daughters, Joanna and Fiona. He was a popular figure, clever, quick-witted, funny, mercurial and very effective. A contemporary recorded that ‘there was never any hurry or worry about his surgery’. He enjoyed driving fast cars, music, reading and walking in the hills of Galloway, where they had a second home. He died on 7 December 2005.