Phyllis George was a consultant general surgeon at the Royal Free Hospital, London and the first woman to be elected as vice president of the Royal College of Surgeons. She was born in Sedgley, Staffordshire on 18 February 1925, but, though she later travelled widely, she remained at heart a Londoner all her life. She was educated at City of London School for Girls. There was no tradition of medicine in her family, but Phyllis, in her senior school years, felt the vocation to become a doctor and so proceeded to the Royal Free School of Medicine, then the only school exclusively for female students. After qualifying in 1948, she would have been expected to train to become a GP or possibly a hospital physician. Phyllis, however, had other ideas. She had always been very practical with her hands and saw her future in surgery, a field which was then almost exclusively occupied by men. Having obtained the challenging fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1953, she was appointed as a registrar and thereafter a senior registrar to Geraldine Barry, the only female general surgeon on the staff of the Royal Free Hospital. Barry was a specialist in thyroid surgery, having been trained by the great Cecil Joll. During her registrarships, Phyllis spent some time at the Memorial Hospital in New York, researching malignant melanomas. The senior surgeon at the Royal Free Hospital at that time was George Qvist, a giant of a man, and Hallet medal prize winner at the Royal College of Surgeons. He strongly believed that a general surgeon should be just that; a surgeon capable of coping with any surgical contingency anywhere in the body at any time of day or night. He practised what he preached, so that his lists might move easily from a thoracotomy and mitral valvotomy to an abdominal gastrectomy or colectomy. He resisted specialisation and academic departments. Phyllis, however, thought differently: she saw the future to be in specialisation. She recognised that surgery was as much a team effort and that, for best results, fully trained teams of theatre staff and ward nursing staff were as important as the actual surgeons. Time has proved her right. Having worked as her registrar for some years, I can confirm that there were almost no complications, morbidity or mortality from her operations. Before the advent of liver transplantation, the only surgical treatment for portal hypertension was the delicate and dangerous operation of portacaval shunt. Sheila Sherlock, the world renowned hepatologist, entrusted all this surgery to Phyllis and her trust was not misplaced. On Barry’s retirement in 1963, Phyllis was appointed to the consultant staff at the Royal Free Hospital. There she blossomed, continuing her specialised thyroid and breast surgery, and showing a particular aptitude and clarity in teaching medical students and junior staff. She had a thoughtful and wise head in medical committees, and this was widely recognised when she was elected president of the section of surgery at the Royal Society of Medicine, and then, in 1979, became the first female member of the Council of the Royal College of Surgeons. In 1988, she became the first female vice president. She might well have become the first female president had not age imposed her retirement. Outside the hospital, Phyllis lead an active and varied social life. Her strong Christian faith sustained her throughout her life. She was very family orientated, and suffered badly after the death of her father in a fire. She loved cooking, and held many memorable parties for her friends and colleagues in her house opposite the new Royal Free Hospital in Pond Street. As a registrar, she had lived in a flat a few yards from the old hospital in Gray’s Inn Road, so she never had to commute and was always easily available and extremely punctual for all her obligations. In her later years, Phyllis moved to a care home in St John’s Wood, where she died peacefully on 6 April 2017 aged 92. She will be deeply missed and ever remembered by all who knew her.