John Robson Kirkup was a consultant orthopaedic surgeon for the Bath clinical area and a noted medical historian. He was born at Sedge Flatt Farm, Ousten, near Chester-le-Street, County Durham on 17 March 1928. His father, John Philip Kirkup, was a tenant farmer supplying food to surrounding coal mines. With financial hardships in the 1930s, he later found employment as a blast furnaceman in Corby, Northamptonshire. John’s mother, Hilda Honor Kirkup née Robson, the daughter of a coal miner, was a primary schoolteacher. His sister Joy became the only other member of the family to enter the medical profession. John attended Kettering Grammar School during the Second World War. He became head prefect and gained entrance to Emmanual College, Cambridge, where he rowed and played rugby for his college. In 1949 he entered St Mary’s Medical School, where again he played for the first XV, also rowing for their eights boat. He qualified in 1952 and, after his house jobs, carried out his National Service in the Royal Navy, as an assistant surgeon at the Malta dockyard. From 1956 to 1958 he was a senior house officer and orthopaedic registrar at the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital, working for Kenneth McKee and John Gibson ‘Ian’ Taylor. Following this, he went on to a senior house officer rotation at Manchester Royal Infirmary, where he was much influenced by Sir John Charnley and David Lloyd-Griffiths. He also spent two years of his training as a general surgical registrar. He then became a senior registrar in orthopaedics at the Bath and Wessex Orthopaedic Hospital. In 1966 he was appointed as a consultant orthopaedic surgeon to the Bath clinical area, where he served out his consultant career until 1988. During his training, he stated that he was influenced by Lord Adrian, Sir Alexander Fleming, Lord Porritt, Arthur Dickson Wright, Sir George Pickering and John Crawford Adams. John took an interest in managing post-polio children and carried out leg lengthening procedures. With an attachment to the Royal National Hospital for Rheumatic Diseases, Bath, he also established a foot clinic and developed a novel and pioneering ankle joint replacement for patients with severe rheumatoid arthritis. He was a founder member and president of the British Orthopaedic Foot Surgical Society and the Rheumatoid Arthritis Surgical Society. Thus, he was a leader in subspecialised surgery before many other surgical ‘splinter’ groups developed. In addition to a career in orthopaedics, John became a leading authority on surgical history, with particular expertise in orthopaedics and the story of surgical instrumentation. His Cambridge University MD thesis was written on ‘A historical study of the surgical armamentarium: origins and materials’. His studies on surgical instrumentation addressed not solely descriptive and historical perspectives, but he championed the understanding of the way surgical instruments evolved, were designed and used, the ergonomics which extend the human hand via these tools. During this part of John’s life, he took a major historical lead by delivering many eponymous lectures in Britain and abroad, teaching surgical history for the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries and serving as a member of the Société Française d’Histoire de la Médecine and the European Association of Museums of the History of Medical Sciences. He was elected president of the British Society for the History of Medicine and of the Historical Medical Equipment Society, which he founded. He edited two and wrote three books on surgical history, as well as many articles. One of the three books was a seminal and unique work on the evolution and functional description of surgical instrumentation (*The evolution of surgical instruments: an illustrated history from ancient times to the twentieth century* Novato, CA, Norman Publishing, 2006). As for his contributions to the Royal College of Surgeons of England, he gave the Thomas Vicary lecture (in 1976) and, most importantly, had a long record of service acting as the more senior of the two honorary curators of the surgical instrument collection. This was a service given over several decades and for all John’s contributions and for medical heritage, he was justly rewarded with the Sir Arthur Keith medal in 1998 and an MBE in 2011, respectively. Latterly, John continued to enjoy walking and tending a large garden. He held a lifelong interest in the identification of wildflowers. During his career, he was supported by his wife, Pierrette Francoise Léger, who came originally from Bordeaux and retained her French nationality. She is a French teacher and artist. John and Pierrette had four children – Helen, Paul, Christine and Noelle. John died on 17 March 2024 at the age of 96. In addition to his orthopaedic skills, he should be remembered as a great contributor to the history of surgery.