Ronald Furlong was a leading orthopaedic surgeon. He was born in Woolwich on 3 March 1909, the son of Ronald John Furlong, a businessman. Ronald was educated at Eltham College and St Thomas's Hospital, where he qualified in 1931. In the following year he won the Cheselden medal in anatomy and surgery and passed his exams for the Fellowship of the College at the age of 25, but had to wait another three years to add 'FRCS' to his name. After junior posts, he specialised in orthopaedics and was at the Rowley Bristow Hospital in Surrey at the outbreak of war, when he joined the RAMC and served throughout the campaigns in North Africa and Italy, ending as a Colonel and officer in charge of No 2 General Hospital. During this period he gained huge experience: at Caserta alone he plated and documented 200 fractures of the femur. In Milan, he worked for the civilian population, becoming adept at treating hand injuries, for which he was blessed by Pope Pius XII. It was during this period that he discovered a Kuntschner nail, used for fixing fractures in long bones, in a German soldier. Once hostilities were over, he tracked down Böhler, who was then hiding in Vienna, who directed him to Kuntschner in Kiel, who demonstrated the use of the device, and gave him one which he brought back to Millbank. He had it copied by Maurice Down, who then marketed the nail throughout the world. At the end of the war, St Thomas's appointed Brigadier Furlong to their staff, without actually asking him, and at once sent him off to the leading orthopaedic centres in America and Europe. In the 1960s, Sir John Charnley introduced hip replacement surgery, but Furlong mistrusted the small head and the need to remove and rewire the greater trochanter in the Charnley procedure. Maurice Muller of Switzerland had developed a different version with a larger head and a curved femoral shaft, which Ronald nicknamed the 'Muller Banana'. However, there were difficulties in importing these devices, so he set up his own company to do so. At this time the most notable biomechanical expert was Friedrich Pauwels of Aachen, Germany, but he spoke no English, so Furlong took German lessons at the Berlitz School until he could study under Pauwels and even translate his books. In 1978 he was awarded the Pauwels medal for this work. When he retired from St Thomas's he continued in private practice at the Queen Victoria Hospital at East Grinstead, West Sussex, and set about devising a cementless prosthesis, which he developed together with Johannes Osborn of Bonn, using hydroxyapatite to coat the shaft of the joint. This device won him the Queen's Award for Technological Achievement, and was the device used on two occasions for Her Majesty the Queen Mother. In 1989, he set up a charity, the Furlong Research Foundation, to evaluate his coated prosthesis, and in 1994, when Max Rayne, who had given St Thomas's £750,000, broke a vertebra in a boating accident, Ronald flew out to see him in Cannes. Furlong was a tall, striking-looking man, an excellent teacher, passionate, vain, and sometimes arrogant. In his latter years he spent his summers in Switzerland, where he died of heart failure on 1 August 2002, leaving his third wife, the former Eileen Watford.