Born at Plymouth, 20 March 1871, the second son and second child of Samuel Bartlett Rawling, civil engineer, and Sarah Ade Bathe Withers, his wife. His elder brother, Brigadier-General Cecil Godfrey Rawling, CMG, CIE, DSO, of the Dorset Light Infantry, was in command of the Gartok survey party and was surveyor to the New Guinea exploratory expedition. In these posts he did such good work that the Royal Geographical Society awarded him more than one of its medals. He was killed in action in France in October 1917. Louis Rawling, like his brother, was educated at Clifton College from May 1885 to July 1889, when the Rev James Maurice Wilson, afterwards Archdeacon of Manchester, was headmaster. He matriculated at Caius College, Cambridge in 1889, and graduated BA in 1893 with second-class honours in part 1 of the Natural Sciences Tripos. At St Bartholomew's Hospital he won the Brackenbury surgical scholarship in 1897, was house surgeon to Alfred Willett, when W Harrison Cripps was the assistant surgeon, was himself elected assistant surgeon in 1904, was attached to "the Blue firm" with D'Arcy Power as his chief, became surgeon in 1919 in place of Sir Anthony A Bowlby, and con-sulting surgeon on resignation in 1932. In the medical school attached to the hospital he was senior demonstrator of anatomy, a teacher of operative surgery, and a lecturer on surgery. At the Royal College of Surgeons he was awarded a certificate and an honorarium in 1902 for the dissertation on fractures of the skull which he had submitted for the Jacksonian prize. He was a Hunterian professor in 1903, 1904, and 1923, and a member of the Court of Examiners 1921-31. When the Territorial Force was constituted, he received a commission in 1908 as captain, RAMC *à la suite*, was called up as major on 2 September 1914, served on the staff of the first and fourth London General Hospitals, and was afterwards ordered to India as officer in charge of the surgical division of the 34th General Hospital. On his return to practice, after demobilization in 1919, he attached himself as surgeon to the West End Hospital for Nervous Diseases. He married on 14 November 1917 Winifred Leake. She survived him with two daughters. After leaving London he lived first at Lavender Corner, Littlestone-on-Sea, Kent, and later at Squabmoor, near Exmouth, Devon, where he died suddenly of a heart attack on 10 May 1940. Rawling was a careful, quick and gentle operator who had the artist's gift of knowing when to stop. He was a first-class teacher of students at the bedside. For some seventeen years before his death an annual dinner, known as the Rawling Club, was held in his honour and was attended by his past and present house surgeons. Sir D'Arcy Power wrote of him: "I knew Louis Bathe Rawling from the time he left Cambridge. He was my assistant surgeon, at that somewhat remote period when it was the duty of the assistant surgeon to attend and help his surgeon in the operating theatre. Tall, good-looking, debonair, of a cheerful countenance, and a gentleman, he always met me with a pleasant word and a smile. We never had any misunderstanding during the many years we worked together. Whilst he was a house surgeon, it was the duty of C B Lockwood and myself, as the two junior assistant surgeons, to supervise the house surgeons at nine o'clock in the casualty department of the hospital. Rawling never had to be reported. He was never a minute late, and he treated the vast hordes of out-patients as human beings. He was always on friendly terms with his dressers, to whom he was known affectionately as 'Jumpy', owing perhaps to his nervous habit of fingering the lapels of his coat. He was somewhat over-sensitive for, being in the ordinary course assistant surgeon to Lockwood my immediate senior, he attached himself to me, on the ground that he was not good at repartee." Publications: *Fractures of the skull*, Hunterian lectures, RCS Edinburgh, 1904. *Landmarks and surface markings of the human body*. London, 1904; 8th (posthumous) edition, 1940. *Surgery of the skull and brain*. London, 1912. *Surgery of the head*. London, 1915.