Raymond Ramsay was born on 19 August 1916 at Peddie, South Africa. He was the youngest child and second son of Alexander Orlando Ramsay, the owner of a trading post, and of his wife Florence, née Tanner. Both parents were born in England; his father (the twelfth child of a preparatory school headmaster) had joined the Cape Mounted Rifle Brigade in the Boer War while his mother was a school teacher at Port Elizabeth. During the first world war she did good work for the British troops in Cape Town for which she was awarded the MBE (civil). The family returned to England in the mid-1920s when his father had made enough money to retire. Raymond and his brother were then educated at Marylebone Grammar School and both became medical students and qualified from Bart's. Following a house surgeon appointment at Woolwich, Raymond joined the RAMC at the outbreak of war and was posted to India. After serving with a cavalry regiment Ramsay was promoted to the rank of major as brigade medical officer to Orde Wingate's first expedition into Burma which shortly suffered severe losses and was split up into many groups. After several months Ramsay's group reached a tributary of the Chindwin river where they were ambushed by the Japanese and taken prisoner. In the course of that encounter Ramsay sustained a bullet wound of the heel which was treated by a Japanese orderly who removed the bullet, dressed the wound and then evacuated him on an elephant. Ramsay arrived at Rangoon jail in 1943 and, after some months in solitary confinement, was to spend the rest of the war there providing devoted medical care under appalling conditions. However, he showed great ingenuity in the overall management of his patients, whether by the use of primitive drugs, dressings and splints or by such basic surgery as could be accomplished in those conditions. Ramsay's diplomacy and general good humour in handling his Japanese captors undoubtedly served him and his fellow prisoners well during more than two years in Rangoon jail. Many spoke and wrote highly of his outstanding service and of his powerful influence in raising morale. Following VJ day and a brief period of recuperation in India, he returned to Britain where the War Office sought his advice as to what psychiatric care might be required by returning POW's. With characteristic spirit and panache he shrewdly advised that anyone who had survived the brutal conditions of a Japanese camp would have developed their own inner resources to cope with later life. After demobilisation Ramsay passed the primary FRCS in 1946 and was appointed as an anatomy demonstrator and then junior registrar in ENT surgery at Bart's. On completing the final FRCS in 1949 he became surgical registrar at the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital before moving to Bristol Royal Infirmary where his further training as a registrar and senior surgical registrar was with Porfessor Milnes Walker and Robert Cooke, to both of whom he expressed his indebtedness. In 1953 Ramsay was appointed consultant surgeon at Slough General Hospital before the hospital services there were transferred to the newly-built Wexham Park, where he remained until his retirement. He was an essentially general surgeon, chiefly involved with breast, thyroid and abdominal surgery. Having been chairman of the medical advisory committee at Wexham Park, he was later chairman of the medical committee for the newly-developed Nuffield private hospital. He was an essentially practical surgeon with little published work, although much sought after by general practitioners and his medical colleagues. His main hobby was sailing and for many years, until ill-health supervened, he kept a yacht on the Hamble river which gave the family many hours of pleasure. A lifelong sufferer from bronchitis and emphysema, who had successfully undergone a colonic resection for a malignant polyp several years before, he eventually died at home from his emphysema on 3 April 1996. He was survived by his wife Lillian Bateman, whom he married in 1952, and by his three sons, William, Alasdair and Jonathan, the eldest, who is a Fellow of the College and consultant urologist at Charing Cross Hospital.