Robert Anstruther Ramsay was born in Montreal on 18 February 1887, his forebears having emigrated to Canada from Aberdeenshire in the latter part of the eighteenth century. He went to school in Canada, the USA and Switzerland and then to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where in 1908 he obtained the BA degree with first-class honours in the Natural Sciences Tripos. He then went to St Bartholomew's Hospital, where he won the Brackenbury Surgical Scholarship and the Willett Medal and qualified with the Conjoint Diploma in 1911. Ramsay became house surgeon to Sir Holburt Waring and took the Cambridge BChir in 1912 and the FRCS in 1913. In 1914 he obtained the MB and in 1916 the MChir of Cambridge. He remained at St Bartholomew's throughout the first world war because lameness resulting from poliomyelitis prevented his volunteering for military service. He was a demonstrator of anatomy and lectured on anatomy and physiology to the nurses at Bart's, and in the reorganisation after the war he was appointed chief assistant to Sir D'Arcy Power. Most of Ramsay's work, however, was done after he left Bart's, for he joined the staff of the Metropolitan Hospital and the Belgrave Hospital for Children and later the Lister Hospital during the war. He was a sound diagnostician, a careful and skilful operator and excellent colleague and good raconteur. Up to the age of 50 he did all his own duty emergencies and after that dealt with them from 8am to 8pm. He is remembered especially for his treatment of pyloric stenosis, which he published in the *British journal of surgery* in 1921. He was bilingual and spent most of his spare time in France, for as his brothers worked in Paris he often visited them, and it was there he met Marguerite Renée de Miniac, whom he married in 1914. Her great grandmother was Laennec's aunt. They had two sons and a daughter. After he retired from his London hospitals he went to live in Paris. He greatly enjoyed music and played the cello very well. He died on 17 October 1975.