Harvey Burton Ross was a consultant surgeon at the Royal Berkshire Hospital, Reading. Born on 1 October 1928 in London, he was the second son of James Patterson Ross KCVO (1st Baronet of Whetstone, Surgeon to King George VI and Queen Elizabeth II) and his wife, Marjorie Burton née Townsend, a former ward sister at St Bartholomew’s Hospital (Barts). His father was a former president of the college and his elder brother, James Keith, was also a fellow and a distinguished cardiac surgeon. After attending preparatory school at The Hall in Hampstead, he was educated at St Paul’s where he was a senior scholar. He studied medicine at Bart’s Hospital Medical School and qualified MB, BS in 1952. While there he was mentored by John Percival Hosford and Edward George Tuckwell. Following graduation he did his national service in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve and remained in the service for many years retiring with the rank of surgeon lieutenant commander. In 1955 he was prosector in anatomy at the college. After undertaking research at Oxford and at the Multnomah Hospital in Portland, Oregon, he returned to Bart’s as a consultant in 1968. He was given specific responsibility to perform vascular shunts in patients with advanced liver cirrhosis. Four years later, in 1972, he returned to more general surgery and took up a consultancy at the Royal Berkshire Hospital in Reading. At that hospital he worked with George Leonard Bohn and Conrad Latto and, by the time he retired in 1993, was acknowledged to be one of the foremost breast cancer surgeons in the country. An enthusiastic and accomplished cricketer, he also got great pleasure from gardening and fly fishing. On 20 October 1962 he married Nancy Joan Hilliam. They had three children, Edward Patterson (born 1963), Imogen (born 1970) and James Hilliam (born 1972). In 1988 he married Susan Christine Blandy. When he died from the complications of Lewy body disease on 18 February 2018 aged 89, he was survived by his third wife Anne, his children and six grandchildren.