Ernest Lewis graduated at the University of Witwatersrand in 1953 and served his residencies in the Johannesburg Teaching Group of Hospitals. He subsequently worked at the Doctors' Hospital in New York, the Birmingham Accident Hospital and the University of Bristol. Obtaining his FRCS he returned to South Africa where he was a resident surgeon at the Baragwanath Hospital in Johannesburg, but then returned to England to study cardiac surgery in Liverpool. He then went back to Cape Town and was registrar to Christiaan Barnard at the Groote Schuur Hospital. Despite this protracted surgical apprenticeship he entered general practice in Germiston in 1964 and became completely and happily involved in family practice. His fame however was in the world of golf where his name was a byword. As a young student he was golfing champion of his university and the South African universities on numerous occasions. He finished second in the Boyd Quaitch Tournament for world universities at the St Andrews golf course in 1950 and in 1952 he was in the South African team which played the amateur British golfers. Despite many offers he never turned professional. The demands of general practice did not allow him further to compete in this type of golf. Ernest Lewis was survived by his wife, Lorna, and a son and daughter, when he died on 22 May 1978.