Sir Ian Fraser was senior consultant surgeon at the Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast, and the Hospital for Sick Children. He was born in Belfast on 9 February 1901, the son of Robert Moore Fraser, a general practitioner, and was educated at the Royal Academical Institution and Queen's University, Belfast, where he took a first in medicine and surgery. He was house surgeon and house physician at the Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast, before becoming RSO at St Helen's, Lancashire. He arrived during the General Strike, and had to hitch a ride to the hospital in a green-grocer's cart laden with potatoes. While he was at St Helen's, he volunteered to go down the local pit to tend the wounded in a mine disaster, after which he organised a training scheme for first aiders, which led him later to become prominent in the St John Ambulance. He was appointed at the age of 26 consultant surgeon at the Belfast Hospital for Sick Children, and went on to work as a house surgeon at the Royal Victoria Hospital. At the outbreak of war, he volunteered for the RAMC and was sent to West Africa, and then to Algiers, to be in charge of a team testing out the new drug Penicillin, using it at first in a trial in septicaemia, where it was at first disappointing, probably because it was given too late. He therefore insisted on taking the new drug to the battlefield, and was sent in the hospital ship *St David* for the invasion of Sicily. There he volunteered to go up the beaches at Cape Passero to search for and attend the wounded during enemy dive-bombing and shelling. Later that day he operated continuously for 48 hours in the hold of his ship and, though worn out, gave a pint of his own blood to one of his patients. He was again active under fire on the beaches in the Salerno landing; for these acts of courage he was awarded the DSO. In June 1944 he was in charge of a field operating theatre near Bayeux shortly after D-Day, and was awarded the OBE. At the end of the war, in 1945, he went to India as consulting surgeon for Central Command, taking with him the first consignment of DDT. After the war, he returned to Belfast, and from 1955 to 1966 was senior consultant. He was President of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland from 1956 to 1957 and of the British Medical Association from 1962 to 1963. Many honours came to him: he was knighted in 1963, was an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow, and DSc Oxford, and bailiff grand cross of the Venerable Order of St John of Jerusalem. He was the target of at least two IRA bomb attacks. He married Eleanor Mitchell in 1931, who predeceased him: they had two sons, John (who died at the age of two) and Mark, a GP in Kent, and a daughter, Mary-Alice. He died on 11 May 1999.