John Dove was an internationally known innovative spinal surgeon, but also a linguist and translator, musician, mountaineer, chess player, wine expert and long-term cancer survivor. Born in Lytham St Annes, Lancashire, on 30 September 1942, he was the son of Leonard Ernest Dove, an HMRC accountant general, and Florence May Dove née Shipley. The family moved to West Wickham in Kent and he attended Beckenham and Penge Grammar School, where he excelled at languages, sport, clarinet and skiffle. On the cusp of going to university to read modern languages, he decided to change to medicine and transferred to the first MB course at St Thomas’s Hospital Medical School in 1961. There he played rugby and cricket and was active in the mountaineering club. He met and married in 1966 fellow student Philippa Alderson and took up a Royal Air Force medical cadetship. After house jobs in Worthing, he became a casualty officer and anatomy demonstrator at St Thomas’. A heavy pipe smoker, in 1971, at the age of 28, he developed an ulcer on his tongue which proved to be a squamous carcinoma. Successful treatment by partial glossectomy and a subsequent block dissection of his neck for a single node metastasis led to a minor speech impairment, which few who met him later in his career either noticed or suspected the cause. Happily, he was still able to play the clarinet. From 1971 to 1976 he was a medical officer in the RAF, where he continued surgical training, landed from an aeroplane under fire during the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, and was prominent in the RAF chess club. On leaving the service, he was appointed to the Birmingham orthopaedic senior registrar training programme, where he developed his major interest in spinal surgery. He spent six months in Hong Kong working with Louis Hsu under the guidance of Arthur Lau in a unit treating mostly tuberculous spinal deformities, being trained in anterior spine surgery and deformity correction. He then spent a further six months in Taiwan working in the same field. In 1980, before taking up his appointment as a consultant in orthopaedic spinal surgery at the North Staffordshire Royal Infirmary, he visited several spinal centres in Europe, culminating in a visit to Pierre Stagnara in Lyon. There he learned to understand the three-dimensional nature of scoliosis and developed an appreciation of the French way of life, particularly the food and wine. Having studied French at A level, he was able to translate into English Stagnara’s classic textbook *Spinal deformity* which, after several further cultural visits to the author, was published in 1987 (London, Butterworths). At the time, the mainstay of surgery for scoliosis in the UK and the US was the Harrington rod from the 1960s. This corrected scoliosis by distraction of the curve via single hooks at the top and bottom levels. The resulting construct lacked strength but was usually adequate for the cohort of children with neuromuscular weakness from the polio epidemics of the 1950s. However, patients with idiopathic scoliosis had to stay in bed, often in plaster casts, for a period of weeks and were mobilised very slowly. Shortly after Harrington’s invention, Eduardo Luque in Mexico City developed a comparatively simple and inexpensive implant system in which two steel rods were attached on each side by sublaminar wires. This stronger structure enabled active children to mobilise within a few days after surgery. In 1981 John Dove, supported by the British Scoliosis Society, visited Mexico and as a linguist and polymath took to Latin American culture as he had to French. He discussed with Luque the idea of replacing the two lengths of plain rod with a customised steel rectangle and on returning to Stoke-on-Trent he devised the highly effective Hartshill rectangle, which was adopted widely in the UK, Europe and beyond. Insertion of sublaminar wires risked damage to the spinal cord, and John Dove pioneered spinal cord monitoring to minimise this. Blood loss from muscle dissection and epidural veins required highly skilled management by a specialised anaesthetist. John recruited such a colleague, Steve Seddon, who stayed with him throughout his career. Based on the success of this implant, John persuaded the manufacturer to fund a biomechanics research fellowship in Stoke-on-Trent in a facility adjacent to Hartshill Orthopaedic Hospital. A succession of orthopaedic registrars interested in spine surgery filled the post. A particular aim was to determine the loads to which spinal implants are subjected, and his fellows worked on developing an implantable strain measuring system with in vivo wireless telemetry for use with the Hartshill Rectangle. Unfortunately, in common with similar research into other various orthopaedic implants, the technical difficulties with surface mounted strain gauges proved insurmountable. However, a number of other projects were completed, including the design of an implant for anterior inter-vertebral fusion, variations of which remain in clinical use. As a senior research fellow at the University of Keele his academic output was high with over 100 published articles, countless presentations, over 50 invited lectureships and supervision of eight postgraduate degree projects. He was a member of numerous professional bodies related to spine surgery with committee responsibilities for several, both in the UK and elsewhere. He was secretary of the British Scoliosis Society and was instrumental in founding the British Orthopaedic Spine Society, feeling with justification that there was a need for a society for spine surgeons not dealing with scoliosis. This society went on to become the British Association of Spine Surgeons, of which he was president from 2000 to 2002. John was an inspiring consultant to train under, both for his expertise in spine surgery and his interests outside medicine. These included mountaineering, music, golf, wine and Latin American literature. In retirement he gained an MSc degree in 2006 from Edinburgh University in Latin American literature, which led him to extensive studies of the life and death of Simón Bolívar via the works of Gabriel García Márquez. His former fellows maintained contact with him and each other by forming the Yalumba (an atrocious pun on an Australian wine) Spine Society. John and Philippa Dove lived in a large rambling house in Stone in Staffordshire with their five children, Rebecca, Stephen, Michael, James and Ben. He was very active in the local community, particularly the Stone Festival. On retirement in 2002 they moved to Acharacle in the Scottish Highlands at the foot of Loch Shiel. Again, John entered fully into the many and varied local community groups, playing the organ in the local church and the clarinet in a chamber group in Fort William. He died suddenly on 12 September 2024 at the age of 81. Clarinet pieces by his favourite composer Mozart were played to the large congregation in Acharacle Parish Church before his burial in a plot facing the mountains he loved.