George Smith was a consultant general surgeon at Scarborough General Hospital. He was born on 19 August 1936 in Nainital in the foothills of the Himalayas. His father was a civil engineer in the Indian Service of Engineers and his mother was a dentist, who had graduated from Edinburgh in the early 1930s. He sent to Woodstock School, in Mussoorie, India, an American school, for a year and then was sent to the Edinburgh Academy as a boarder, where he excelled academically, enjoyed all sports, and won a cup for the best junior piper. From the Academy he won the Palmer anatomy scholarship to St Mary’s Hospital Medical School, where he gained a scholarship to study for a BSc in anatomy, for which he was awarded first class honours. He then withdrew from St Mary’s to study clinical medicine at Oxford, where he entered Christchurch College, qualifying BM BCh in 1962. He then did house jobs at the Radcliffe, followed by a year as demonstrator of anatomy in Edinburgh. He then completed house surgeon jobs at the Birmingham Accident Hospital, in the burns unit at Great Ormond Street and was senior house officer at Cardiff Infirmary. He went on to be a surgical registrar at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge. In 1967 he became lecturer in the professorial unit at the Westminster Hospital under Harold Ellis, from which he passed the Oxford DM thesis and MCh examinations. In 1968 he became senior registrar at St George’s Hospital, which rotated to the Norfolk and Norwich, Winchester, and the Royal Marsden hospitals. In 1973 he was appointed consultant surgeon at Scarborough General Hospital. There he practised the full range of general surgery, continued to publish extensively, and was highly regarded. He retired in 1997. A quiet, reserved man, with a dry sense of humour, he had many outside interests, including cricket and supporting the Scottish rugby team. He died on 1 August 2008, leaving a widow Angela and a son (Robert) and daughter (Charlotte).