Robert Roaf was a distinguished orthopaedic surgeon and one of the few remaining pre-war Himalayan climbers. He was born into a Canadian academic family in Golders Green, London, on 25 April 1913, the second son of Herbert Eldon Roaf, professor of physiology at Liverpool, and Beatrice Sophia, the daughter of Sir William Herdman, foundation professor of zoology at Liverpool University. The Roaf family hailed from Kent, and one had been a ships’ carpenter at Trafalgar. Pneumonia in childhood left Robert with asthma, but this did not stop him from winning a scholarship to Winchester, or later on the Frazer scholarship and domus exhibition to Balliol College, Oxford. There he gained a first in the final honour school of physiology and biochemistry, though in later years he confessed to finding the lectures boring. He spent his vacations climbing in the Alps. In 1933 a chance encounter with the mountaineer and writer Marco Pallis was to have a lasting influence on Roaf’s life. Two years later Roaf was delegated to a conference in the Soviet Union and, just before his departure, Pallis invited him to join his next climbing expedition in Sikkim and Tibet. The Himalayan expedition, which included the explorer Freddie Spencer Chapman, was modest, but Roaf, as medical officer, had to learn Tibetan in order to cope with the patients he was invited to treat, many of whom suffered from disorders long since extinct in England. He returned to Liverpool to complete his training. Although he was by now a Quaker and a pacifist, the air raids on Liverpool made him decide that he could not eat food that had been brought to England at the expense of so many sailors’ lives. He joined the Merchant Navy as a ship’s surgeon, but undulant fever invalided him out in 1943 and he moved to the emergency hospital in Winwick, Cheshire. In 1946 he was appointed as an assistant surgeon at the Liverpool Royal Infirmary. The following year he moved to the Orthopaedic Hospital, Oswestry. There he developed new methods for treating scoliosis. In 1952 he set up a training programme in Delhi, as part of the Colombo Plan, and on his return, in 1955, was appointed director of clinical studies and research at Oswestry. In 1963 he became professor of orthopaedics in Liverpool. There he encouraged his students to do something adventurous and imaginative during their electives. He continued to make overseas trips, especially to the Himalayas, long after he retired. He published extensively, including *Scoliosis* (Edinburgh/London, E & S Livingstone, 1966), *Spinal deformities* (Tunbridge wells, Pitman Medical, 1977), *Textbook of orthopaedic nursing* (Oxford, Blackwell Scientific, 1971) and *The paralysed patient* (Oxford, Blackwell Scientific, 1977). He married Ceinwen Roberts in 1939, who predeceased him by one week. They had two sons and two daughters. Roaf died aged 93 on 16 February 2007.