Born on 14 April 1891 son of Joseph Dew of Melbourne, he was educated at Scottish College and the University of Melbourne. After graduation in 1914 he joined the RAMC and served as a Captain throughout the war, first in France and later in Egypt and Palestine. Returning to Melbourne after the war he was appointed to the staff of the Royal Melbourne Hospital in 1923 and assistant director of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research associated with the hospital. He was Jacksonian Prize essayist in 1923, when the subject was *Malignant disease of the Testicle*; he enlarged his essay into a monograph in 1925. Working at the Institute in association with Hamilton Fairley he wrote his classic monograph on *Hydatid Disease* in 1928. In 1928 he was a founder fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons of which he became President in 1954-55. In 1930 he moved to Sydney on his appointment as the first whole-time professor of surgery in the University, with the clinical appointment at the Prince Alfred Hospital. He remained in Sydney till his retirement in 1956 at the age of 65, having served as Dean of the Faculty of Medicine from 1937 until 1952. He gained the Symes Prize of the University of Melbourne in 1927, and was a Hunterian Professor at the College in 1930 and again in 1953 when he was in Britain as Sims Commonwealth Travelling Fellow. He initiated research into problems of blood coagulation and of heart surgery. He was an excellent teacher, with sound clinical judgment and a keen sense of humour. While he was in Egypt and Palestine in 1917-18 he made a collection of pathological specimens illustrating bacillary and amoebic dysentery and bilharziasis, which he divided between the Australian War Museum and the College; this part was destroyed in the holocaust of 1941. He married in 1925 Doreen, daughter of Norman Lawrance of Melbourne, by whom he had two daughters. Dew died at his home in Melbourne in the night of 17/18 November 1962.