George Douglas Robb was born in Auckland on 29 April 1899 and educated at Auckland Grammar School, and Auckland University College and Otago University, graduating BSc and MB ChB in 1922. The following year he went to England and worked for his Fellowship in the company of three other pioneer thoracic surgeons, H P Nelson, Sir Thomas Holmes Sellors and M P Susman. He was dogged by recurrent bouts of pulmonary tuberculosis, a disease which affected his father and killed his older brother. He interrupted his training to make a trip as a ship's surgeon to South Africa, partly to give his health a respite. Having gained the FRCS he worked in Ipswich and there developed an interest in the surgery of varicose veins, large bowel and rectum. In 1928 he returned to New Zealand and became one of the first specialists to confine himself to consulting practice without undertaking the usual quota of general practice. He was appointed honorary assistant surgeon in 1929 but terminated the post rather abruptly in 1935, finding it hard to accept medical styles and standards which he felt were many years behind the times. For the next seven years he was without a hospital appointment and continued a rather precarious private practice, developing a special interest in surgery of varicose veins, but was still hampered by ill health. Arrangements were made for him to travel to Sydney in 1936 for a thoracoplasty but the tuberculosis suddenly disappeared and never worried him again. Possibly due to his own illness he returned to England to study thoracic surgery and, in 1942, he was invited to start a new cardiothoracic surgical unit at the Green Lane Hospital. It was here that he achieved his major surgical fame. He was elected to the Council of Auckland University College in 1938 and was appointed to the Council of Massey Agricultural College in Palmerston North and then to the University Senate. He completed 33 years on the Council of Auckland University by a seven year term as Chancellor. He worked hard towards the founding of a school of medicine and although for many years he was a voice in the wilderness and was actively opposed by the medical school authorities in the University of Otago, he persisted and by 1959 the University of New Zealand appointed him chairman of a steering committee. It was 1968 before the school took its first students and in November 1973, Douglas Robb spoke at the first qualifying ceremony and saw the Douglas Robb Prize given to the most distinguished academic scholar in the clinical years of the course. Internationally he was well known. In 1956 his head was exhibited in bronze at the Royal Academy. Three years later he was elected as one of the two Simms Commonwealth Travelling Professors and travelled overseas to Africa and Britain in 1960. The following year he was elected Chairman of the BMA. In 1966 he visited China and in 1968 - when nearly seventy - he did a surgical locum in Honiara in the British Solomon Islands. He retired in 1964 but continued in his work for the New Zealand Medical Research Council, his promotion of medical education throughout the Commonwealth, his work for WHO and the development of the University. His leisure was spent in fishing and planting native trees during holidays at his cottage in the Bay of Islands. He died on the eve of his 75th birthday, 28 July 1974, survived by his wife, a son John and two daughters Jenny and Sally.