Harold William Burge was born on 23 July 1909. He originally entered King's College, London, as an engineering student and shortly transferred to the faculty of medicine to graduate from King's College Hospital in 1933. After a few years in general practice he decided on a career in surgery and took the Final FRCS in 1937. He was then resident assistant surgeon at the West London Hospital and resident surgical officer at the Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford. During the second world war he served in the RAMC, commanding a field surgical unit in North Africa and later at the Salerno and Anzio landings. He was mentioned in despatches and awarded the MBE (Mil). Shortly after demobilisation he was appointed honorary surgeon to the West London Hospital in 1947, and then surgeon to the Ministry of Pensions Gastric Unit at Stoke Mandeville Hospital and consultant surgeon to the Northwood and Pinner District Hospital. At West London Hospital and Stoke Mandeville he was able to develop his special interest in gastric surgery. He was one of the pioneers of truncal vagotomy, leading on to bilateral selective vagotomy and proximal gastric vagotomy, so becoming an international authority in this field. In his determination to establish the completeness of this operation, Harold Burge developed, and was an enthusiastic exponent of, the electrical stimulation test. He was a tireless teacher, attracting visitors to the West London Hospital from many parts of the world, where he received everyone with warm courtesy. Following local hospital reorganisation, he later transferred from the staff of West London to Charing Cross Hospital. Harold Burge was an examiner for the universities of London and Oxford. He served on the Court of Examiners of the College and was also an honorary surgical tutor. He was a Hunterian Professor in 1959 and 1965 and both his lectures were related to vagotomy. He travelled widely in Europe, America and the East and made numerous contributions to the literature of gastric surgery, including his monograph *Vagotomy*, published in 1964. He was a man of great enthusiasm and not all of his colleagues shared his faith in the electrical stimulation test as a means of determining the completeness of vagotomy. However, he was fruitful of ideas, a valuable catalyst in the discussion of his own surgical interests and impatient to follow them through even after his retirement. Outside his surgical work, he was a keen golfer and his chief interests were in his family and his garden. He died on 19 December 1975, after a long illness, and was survived by his wife and daughter, and by two sons, both of whom are doctors.