Educated in Australia, he graduated from the University of Sydney in 1920 and then came to London, where he worked at St Mary's and Guy's Hospitals. After taking the Fellowship in 1923 he held resident posts at St George's, the West London and the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospitals. He then married and settled as an orthopaedic surgeon at Bournemouth. He established orthopaedic departments in the two chief hospitals in the town, and was on the staff at Boscombe and Poole hospitals also. He was orthopaedic surgeon to the Shaftesbury Society's Victoria Home for Crippled Children for twenty years. Under the National Health Service he became consulting orthopaedic surgeon for the Bournemouth and the Dorset Hospital Groups. He retired in 1962. In spite of ill health, which he bore with stoicism for many years, Ross Smith took an active part in professional and local affairs. He was a founder, and for ten years chairman, of the Dorset County Association for the Disabled and a governor of the British Provident Association's Bournemouth branch. He served on the Bournemouth Borough Council's health committee for ten years, and was a council member of the Non-teaching Hospitals Medical Staffs Association. In the British Medical Association Ross Smith was an exemplary honorary secretary of the Bournemouth division for six years, including the difficult period 1945-48 between the end of the second world war and the beginning of the National Health Service, and was chairman of the division for 1955-57; he served also on the Central Consultants' and Specialists' Committee. He heard with great pride that he had been elected an Honorary Fellow of the Association a week before his death on 24 August 1965, aged 68. His wife Freda survived him, but they had no children; they lived at 33 Tower Court, West Cliff Road. He was an unassuming, kind and hospitable man.