John Ian Burn was a consultant general surgeon at Charing Cross Hospital, London. He was born on 19 February 1927 and grew up in Ilford, northeast London. His father, Cecil Walter Burn, was orphaned as a small boy, fought and was wounded in the First World War, and then worked as a civil servant for the London Electricity Board. His mother, Margaret Hannah Burn née Cawthorne, was a primary school teacher with a special interest in mathematics. Her father, Albert Cawthorne, was a Victorian patriarch who worked his way up from relative poverty in a working-class area of Liverpool to become chief librarian of the London Borough of Stepney. He was a great influence on his grandson. Shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War, Ian was sent to join other evacuees in Aberdare, south Wales. There he had a difficult time; he was poorly cared for and often hungry. His schoolwork suffered and his grandfather Albert found him a place at Eltham College, based at Taunton School, where in the autumn of 1941 he started as a boarder. At Taunton he enjoyed playing rugby and cricket and developed an ambition to become a doctor. He was accepted at Barts and, in 1944, aged 17, he left Taunton to start his medical career. With the war still on, the medical school students were relocated to Queens’ College, Cambridge. He found anatomy particularly fascinating and decided early on that he would dedicate himself to becoming a surgeon. When the war ended the medical students moved back to Barts, where he spent as much time in the operating theatre as possible. During these years he also took part in a considerable amount of sport, including athletics and cricket, and met his future wife, Fiona Allan, a nurse. At this time Ian was a very accomplished long-distance runner, captaining the London University athletics squad coached by former Olympic athlete Henry Stallard and winning the Championship Shield in 1948 with celebrated fellow team-mates such as the future Olympic medallist Arthur Wint. In 1950 he began work as a house surgeon at Hill End, St Albans, then, called up for National Service, he joined the RAF as a surgeon in a military hospital near Lincoln, going on to run the unit. In 1953 he went back to Cambridge to teach anatomy, then in 1955 to Barts, initially as a surgical registrar in the casualty department. After a spell at the North Middlesex Hospital, he subsequently went to the Postgraduate Medical School of London at Hammersmith Hospital, where he completed his FRCS. Ian began to take a special interest in the surgical treatment of cancer and was asked to set up a cancer surgery unit at Hammersmith. In 1961 he was awarded a travelling fellowship to the Roswell Park Institute in Buffalo, New York, where he and his family, by now including three children, spent a year. At the time the institute was developing new regional chemotherapy treatments, and he specialised in surgical methods of delivering the drugs to precise areas of the body. At the same time, he also began working on his first book – *Systematic surgery*(London, Staples Press) – published in 1965. Back in England, alongside his work in academic surgery at the Hammersmith, he started work as an NHS consultant at St Charles’ Hospital, Ladbroke Grove. Over the next few years, he operated on cancer patients and carried out research into surgery of the lymph nodes, for which he was awarded a Hunterian professorial lectureship in 1967. That same year Hammersmith Hospital set up a clinic specialising in breast cancer and Ian was asked to run the unit. He lectured at international conferences, going on lecture tours to India, Thailand, Hong Kong and Japan. In 1971 he was appointed as an assistant director of surgical studies, responsible for the postgraduate academic programme, and was heavily involved in breast cancer research alongside operating full-time. He was long concerned that the discipline of surgical oncology should be properly recognised. He was impressed by forward thinking in this regard in the USA compared with the UK and much of Europe. With fellow surgeon Ronald Raven, he was instrumental in founding the British Association of Surgical Oncology (BASO) – an umbrella organisation to promote and train doctors in the surgical aspects of cancer treatment. Ian went on to become president of the organisation after Raven retired. He subsequently helped bring together BASO with its European counterparts to form the European Society of Surgical Oncology, of which he also became president. In 1973 Ian began a consultant post at the newly built Charing Cross Hospital, specialising in breast cancer. He was involved in research programmes into screening for breast cancer, as well as the possible carcinogenic effects of various hormones. Both these would cause controversy. In 1975 the screening programme was shut down by the government on cost grounds. He protested loudly, attracting media attention and ultimately leading to his disinvitation from various committees. It would be 1988 before the screening programme returned. In 1974 he publicised work on possible correlations between breast cancer and oral contraceptives. This too resulted in much media coverage, some quite negative, but typified again his desire to say what he thought was in his patients’ best interest. In 1977 he opened a private practice in Harley Street. In the same year he was elected as an honorary secretary of the Royal Society of Medicine, organising lecture programmes and becoming an examiner for the Royal College of Surgeons of England. Back at Charing Cross, where he still ran the breast unit, he was appointed NHS chairman of the division of surgery. This role included participating in regional committees alongside the now growing number of non-medical health administrators. In 1983 huge cuts were announced. He fought vociferously against the cost-cutting and reorganisations of those years, but eventually, despite local protests and petitions, his unit was closed. He became increasingly disillusioned with the administrative and governance changes to the NHS that he had so loved and, by 1986, he could no longer tolerate the repeated obstacles that in his view interfered with the proper care of patients. He resigned from the NHS in 1988; on his last working day at Charing Cross Hospital, he went to see Shostakovich’s opera of betrayal *Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk*, which, in his words, ‘seemed appropriate at the time’. His private practice continued, performing surgery at the King Edward VII Hospital in Midhurst, where he eventually became medical director in the early 1990s. He remained active in building the contacts between different surgical oncology organisations, and in 1990 helped form the World Federation of Surgical Oncology Societies with himself as the inaugural president. Ian was very interested in the history of surgery. In 1986 he joined the Barber Surgeons, where he played an active role, editing two books on the history of the company. His final operating session came just before his 70th birthday, and he retired in 1997, having continuously practised surgery for 47 years. In his 2007 autobiography *Journey of a cancer surgeon* (Memoir Club) he spoke movingly about his passion for surgery and describes the physical pleasure (for him) of entering the changing room and scrub area, likening the experience of the operating theatre with the theatre of operatic performance. In retirement he furthered his passions for opera, gardening and sport with the same intensity that he had shown for medicine. He graduated aged 74 with a BA in opera studies from the University of Manchester, then gained a certificate in horticulture from the Royal Horticultural Society at 77. In later years he took to croquet with equal passion, founding the Rother Valley Croquet Club and followed vigorously his own advice that as a sport croquet is ‘a true prescription for healthy living’. He had written in draft a book on gardening and health and was still contemplating further writing projects in his final year. Ian Burn died in April 2024 aged 97 at Witney, Oxfordshire, one year and one month exactly after his beloved wife Fiona.