Robert Anthony Bowness Wood was an innovative consultant breast and general surgeon in Dundee. He was born in Horsforth, near Leeds on 12 April 1943. Both of his parents, John Fletcher Wood and Mabel Wood née Bowness, were pharmacists. He boarded at St Peter’s School in York and then studied medicine at Leeds University. He qualified in 1965 with the Tomlin prize in ophthalmology. He carried out house posts at Leeds General Infirmary and then spent a year in Glasgow working as an assistant lecturer in the department of anatomy, where he worked with Graham Teasdale, the inventor of the Glasgow coma scale. Wood subsequently spent a year in London and in Birmingham, before moving to Norwich and then Cardiff. At Cardiff, he developed a new wound dressing made from silicone foam elastomer, which was non-adherent, non-allergenic, absorbent and allowed air to circulate around the wound (‘Foam elastomer dressing in the management of open granulating wounds: experience with 250 patients’ *Br J Surg* 1977 64 554-7). The elastomer was injected into the wound and could be left for up to a week, reducing the number of dressing changes needed. Wood became an adviser to the manufacturer Dow Corning. From July 1975 to August 1976 he was a research instructor in Chicago. From September 1976, he was a senior lecturer at Dundee University and an honorary general surgeon at Ninewells Hospital, where he worked closely with Alfred Cuschieri, the professor of medicine surgery. Together they developed the UK’s first dedicated one-stop breast clinic to speed up diagnosis and treatment, meaning patients could undergo mammograms and fine needle cytology and receive results on the same day (‘Needle aspiration of the breast with immediate reporting of material’ *Br Med J* 1979 2 185-7). As well as breast surgery, Wood performed gastrointestinal and thoracic surgery, and worked on the renal transplantation programme. He also helped Ronald Harden, professor of medical education at Dundee, design and implement his idea of an objective structured clinical examination (OSCE), where a student passed through several stations and completed a series of tasks, while being observed by an examiner who marked against a checklist (‘A new approach to a final examination in surgery. Use of the objective structured clinical examination’ *Ann R Coll Surg Engl* 1979 61 400-5). Wood retired from the NHS in 2008, but continued to teach anatomy at the University of St Andrews. Throughout his life, he had an enduring love of nature and the outdoors, and was a keen hill-walker and traveller. He also loved music and was president of the Dundee Chamber Music Club. He also enjoyed gardening, particularly growing vegetables. Wood met his wife Elizabeth May (née Spiers) at Leeds General Infirmary. She went on to become an immunologist. They had four children, Chris, Tim, Alison and Susannah, and nine grandchildren. Wood died from motor neurone disease on 27 October 2016. He was 73.