Keith Douglas Vowles was a consultant general surgeon at the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital. He was born on 22 April 1923, the son of Robert Douglas Vowles and Evelyn Frances Vowles née Higgins. He was educated at Bristol Grammar School and then studied medicine at Bristol University, qualifying in 1946. He held house posts in Bristol, Worcester and York and then joined the Royal Army Medical Corps, where he served in the British Military Hospital in Benghazi, north Africa, as a graded surgeon. He trained in surgery in Wales under Lambert Rogers, in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, at Harvard with John Dunphy and in Bristol, as a lecturer, under Robert Milnes Walker. He gained his FRCS in 1953. In 1962 he was appointed as a consultant at the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital. Here he played a key role in the design of the new hospital, which opened in 1974. He was also instrumental in setting up the day care unit and developing vascular surgery. He was a surgical tutor for the Royal College of Surgeons of England. He published papers on, among other topics, wound healing, pancreatitis and hernia under local anaesthetic, and wrote a book *Surgical problems in the aged* (Bristol, Wright, 1979), which led to invitations to speak at geriatric conferences in Italy and San Francisco. After his retirement in 1987, he worked as a relief surgeon to a number of mission hospitals in India, Kenya, Zambia and Thailand, teaching surgery in resource-poor contexts. After recovering from a heart attack, he finally retired to Dunsford, Devon, where he enjoyed village life and pursued woodcarving, scuba diving, hiking, wild swimming and camping holidays. Vowles died from pneumonia at the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital on 17 October 2021 at the age of 98, having twice survived covid in his final year. Predeceased by his wife Mary (née Knowles), a fellow doctor, whom he married in 1948, he was survived by their eldest son, Rob, four grandchildren and six great grandchildren.