Ivor Lewis, was born at Llanddeusant, Carmarthenshire, in October 1895, the only son of a farmer who was devoted to music and Welsh literature, and of a devout mother who always hoped that her son would ultimately take to the pulpit. After early education at Llandello Grammar School, where he did well in both science and the classics, he went on to University College, Cardiff, for preclinical study and then to University College Hospital, London, where he gained the Liston Gold Medal in surgery before qualifying in 1920. Inspired by Wilfred Trotter and Gwynne Williams, he determined on a career in surgery and was astute enough to see the potentialities of the developing municipal hospital service. Whilst resident surgical officer at Lewisham he passed the MD and, later, the MS examinations and was then appointed surgeon and medical director of the City Hospital in Plymouth. He there introduced daily visiting of patients by their relatives many years before this practice became widespread. Significant to the next stage of his life was his move in 1933 to North Middlesex Hospital, an institution which was rapidly developing under the enlightened administration of the Middlesex County Council. It is often forgotten that the municipal service only replaced the old poor law hospitals in 1929 and that great improvements were achieved in the ten years before the outbreak of the second world war. As surgeon and medical director of that hospital Ivor was instrumental in much of the progress then made, and he also seized the opportunity to visit hospitals and clinics in the USA and Europe where he became well-known and respected by a wide circle of surgeons. It was at North Middlesex Hospital that Lewis laid the foundations of his future high reputation. He became expert in major surgery of the abdomen and chest, and was also active in the early work on the nailing of fractures of the femoral neck. Yet he never neglected the everyday bread-and-butter problems, such as post-operative wound complications and large inguinal herniae. Moreover, after due planning and preparation, he managed to accomplish the first successful pulmonary embolectomy operation in Great Britain in 1939. For many years that patient was to remain the only successful case in the English literature and subsequently, when she died in Chase Farm Hospital during an influenza epidemic some 12 years later, necropsy examination revealed little sign of the original pulmonary arteriotomy. For his pioneer work on a new approach to removal of carcinoma of the oesophagus (via abdomen and right chest) he was appointed as a Hunterian Professor and admitted to the FRCS by election in 1948. He had not served in the armed forces during the first world war, having twice been medically rejected on the basis of a mitral murmur, and he was already in his mid-forties by the outbreak of the second world war when he undertook an excessively heavy stint of work in north London. After the war, when at his surgical zenith, he seized the chance of returning to his native Wales for which he had the most powerful yearning. Together with his wife Nancie (née Faux), who had long been his expert anaesthetist, the family moved to Rhyl. He was appointed general surgeon there with thoracic beds at Llangwyfan and Abergele hospitals. Although this provided him with the chance to give up medical administration, he always felt that 'only a sailor, not a clerk, should be running a ship'. It is interesting to record that, during the three years he remained at North Middlesex after the NHS, the then North West Metropolitan Hospital Board had made it plain to him that they did not approve of 'medical superintendents'! Whatever his own feelings may have been, it is clear that the move to Wales gave him a new lease of life, with highly fulfilling years of service, and the opportunity to train a succession of excellent young surgeons, mainly from Canada and Australia. Lewis was a demon for work and a hard taskmaster who made as heavy demands on himself as on his medical and nursing teams. He was a big man in every sense of the word; his juniors served him with loyalty, and he was always a keen and dogmatic teacher of both undergraduates and postgraduates. He dearly loved his native Wales and its culture and was a fluent Welsh speaker. He became a member of the Gorsedd of Bards and the National Eisteddfod and he was an elder of the Calvinistic Methodist Church at the delightful country chapel of Cefn Meiriadog. At the age of 83 he was delighted to be admitted DSc honoris causa, at the University of Wales, by its Chancellor, H R H the Prince of Wales, in the presence of the immediate past Chancellor, H R H the Duke of Edinburgh. When he died at the age of 86, on 11 September 1982, at St Asaph, he was survived by his wife Nancie, and by two daughters and two sons, both of whom are medical graduates.