Maurice Ewing, first professor of surgery at Melbourne University, was born in Edinburgh on 6 July 1912, the youngest of four sons of Thomas Miller Ewing, master mariner, who, like his father and grandfather, was a captain in the Northern Lighthouse Service, and his wife Annabel Rossie. He was educated at Daniel Stewart's College, where he was captain and *dux* of the school and a member of the rugby team. He was awarded the Creighton scholarship to Edinburgh University, where he read medicine from 1930 to 1935. He qualified as the head of his year as Ettles first scholar and Mouan scholar in the practice of physic. His house jobs were at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, where from 1936 to 1937 he was house surgeon to Sir David Wilkie, who influenced him considerably. Subsequently he was at the Royal Leicester Infirmary. Before the commencement of the second world war, he returned to Edinburgh as a demonstrator in anatomy and physiology and as a surgeon to outpatients. With the outbreak of war, he entered the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, serving as a temporary Surgeon Lieutenant from 1940 to 1945, at the naval hospital in Bighi, Malta. With the end of hostilities, he took up a post at the Hammersmith Hospital with Ian Aird and remained there until 1955, when he was appointed as first occupant of the new chair of surgery at Melbourne University. During these years he was a Hunterian lecturer and he won a travelling fellowship to Scandinavia and a British Empire fellowship to Memorial Hospital, New York, with Hayes Martin. The chair which he took in Melbourne was based, initially, at the Alfred Hospital, but later moved to the Royal Melbourne. Ewing was also responsible for surgical teaching at St Vincent's Hospital and Prince Henry's Hospital, thus covering four institutes. Subsequently, with the reorganisation of medical schools in Melbourne and their associated hospitals, six professors took up what Ewing managed alone. Ewing's principal clinical interests were in renal transplantation, which he pioneered in Australia; cancer, particularly of the head and neck; parenteral nutrition and peripheral vascular disease. He also introduced the practice of using sheepskins under the patient to avoid pressure sores. He was an excellent lecturer and gave a number of formal lectures and orations, both in Australia and overseas. Ewing married Phyllis Edith Parnall, whom he had met in Malta where she was a Volunteer Air Detachment nurse, in 1946. They had two sons, Hamish and Alastair, one of whom did medicine, and a daughter, Sarah. He had always been a keen gardener and on retirement he moved to a country property where he could indulge this interest. In his later years he was afflicted with Alzheimer's disease. He died on 24 June 1999.