John Gowan Gray, known as ‘Ian’, was a consultant surgeon at the North Staffordshire Royal Infirmary, Stoke-on-Trent, and the Leek Memorial Hospital. He was born in Dalkeith, Midlothian, and qualified at Edinburgh, where he completed junior house posts. During the Korean War he served his National Service in the RAMC in the Far East. He returned to train in surgery, first at Glasgow Royal Infirmary and then at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham, where he was a lecturer on the surgical unit. During this time he won a research fellowship to the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, doing transplant surgery under Paul Russell and carrying out the research which gained him a Hunterian Professorship in 1966. In 1965 he was appointed consultant surgeon in North Staffordshire, remaining there until he retired in 1992. His main interest was in transplant surgery, but latterly he turned his attention to the surgery of tumours of the breast and parathyroid. A keen golfer, he was captain of the Trentham Golf Club in 1987. His wife Margaret predeceased him. He died on 11 December 2005 from carcinoma of the pancreas, leaving six children.