Harris B Shumacker was chairman of the department of surgery at Indiana University and a pioneer of cardiovascular surgery. He was born on 20 May 1908 in Laurel, Mississippi, the son of Harris Blumenthal Shumacker and Corinne Selma Shumacker née Teller. He attended the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and Vanderbilt University, and completed his medical studies at Johns Hopkins University. He trained in surgery at Johns Hopkins under Alfred Blalock then, from 1936 to 1938, he was an instructor in surgery at Yale University. He subsequently moved back to Johns Hopkins, where he was an instructor from 1938 to 1941. In 1942, he joined the US Army and fought in the Pacific during the Second World War. Following his demobilisation in 1946, he became an associate professor at Yale. In 1948, he was appointed as the third chairman of the department of surgery at Indiana University's School of Medicine and served in that role until 1968. Here he established an internationally renowned department with a particular interest in cardiovascular surgery. After his retirement from Indiana University, he became a professor and special adviser at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Bethesda, Maryland. He performed the first open heart surgeries in Indiana and worked to develop synthetic grafts for valve and blood vessel replacement. He described sympathectomy for frostbite and, with Harold King, was the first to describe post-splenectomy infection and sepsis. He also worked on the early development of the artificial heart. Shumacker was the author or co-author of nearly 600 papers and wrote 50 monographs or chapters in textbooks. He was either president or chairman of most of the leading surgical societies in the United States. In December 1933, he married Myrtle (known as 'Myrtie') E Landau. They had two sons, Peter and James, and six grandchildren. Myrtie died in 1992 and Shumacker married Grace. He died on 14 November 2009 at the age of 101.