Richard Frank Rand was educated at the University of Edinburgh, won the Wightman prize in 1880, and served as demonstrator of anatomy. He acted as house surgeon at the Oldham Infirmary, and after taking his FRCS went to the West Indies where he practised for some years in Jamaica. A severe attack of yellow fever left him with impaired health and chronic deafness. In 1890 he migrated to South Africa and volunteered for service with the expedition which Cecil Rhodes organized to occupy Mashonaland. Rand was appointed medical officer to the Chartered Company's police and in 1895-99 was surgeon to the Fort Salisbury Hospital. In this position he did such good work that he was offered a knighthood, which he declined on the ground that he could not afford it. The hospital was a wattle-and-daub building, to which drugs and supplies had to be brought by bullock wagons over a thousand miles of rough track rendered almost impassable for many weeks during the rainy season. His duties took him on horseback to the outlying camps of prospectors and traders ill of malaria and dysentery aggravated by an absence of the elementary necessities of existence. He served with distinction during the South African war, when he was put in charge of the military hospital on Roberts' Heights, and on its conclusion he returned to England, giving as his address, during 1900-09, 30 Bury Street, St James's, SW. From 1910 to 1935 he was again at Salisbury, but took part in the war of 1914-18 in the campaigns in South-West Africa and in East Africa. Retiring in 1935 he settled at Brightlingsea, Essex, where he died on 3 January 1937. Rand was interested in botany and many of his discoveries in South African flora are to be found at Kew and there bear his name. His gifts to the British Museum herbarium were described in the *Journal of Botany*.