Born about 1880 he was educated at the University of Edinburgh, where he graduated in 1903, taking also the triple qualification of the Scottish Royal medical corporations. He went to South Africa as civil surgeon to the military hospital at Middelburg (1903-04) and from 1905 to 1908 was a district surgeon and magistrate in the Orange River Colony. He came home, took the Fellowship at the beginning of 1909, and was appointed first assistant to the professor of anatomy in the school of medicine at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. He began to publish results of anatomical research at this time, joined the Royal Academy of Medicine of Ireland, and was commissioned in the Officers Training Corps. He worked at Freiburg in Germany in 1910-11, and was then appointed demonstrator of anatomy and lecturer on embryology under Professor William Wright FRCS at the London Hospital Medical College. He belonged to the Anatomical and Zoological Societies and to the Anthropological Institute, and continued to publish his researches. He was also active in the OTC of London University. During the first world war he served in the RAMC and won the DSO in 1917. After the war he seems not to have resumed practice or research. He retired to a cottage near Leybourn, Yorkshire, where he died early in 1952. Publications: Congenital absence of transverse mesocolon. *Brit med J* 1910, 2, 1160. A curious arrangement of the retro-clavicular musculature. *Anatomischer Anzeiger* 1910, 37, 148. Human embryo of the fifth week. *Dublin Journal of Medical Sciences*, 1910, 130, 475. Note upon an anomalous form of parotid gland. *J Anat* 1911, 45, 442-443. Contribution to the embryology of the fore-limb skeleton. *J Anat* 1914, 48, 355-377. **See below for an additional and expanded obituary uploaded 2 July 2020:** Norman Cecil Rutherford was a military surgeon and anatomist who was decorated in the First World War, suffered from shellshock and in 1919 was tried for the murder of a fellow officer, Miles Seton. He served time in Broadmoor Hospital and later resumed his medical career. He was born on 14 March 1882 in Bradford. His father, John James Rutherford, was a doctor in Shipley; his mother was Nanny Rutherford née Firth. He studied medicine at Edinburgh University and, while still a student, eloped with Alice Maud Roberts, the daughter of James Roberts (later Sir James), a Yorkshire industrialist and businessman. The pair fled to Scotland, where they were married on 27 August 1902. Rutherford went on to qualify a year later. In September 1903, he set sail for Cape Town, South Africa, and served as a civilian surgeon to the military hospital in Middelburg, Cape Colony. His wife joined him and their first child, Sibyl Margaret, was born in April 1904 in an Army tent. When Alice’s younger brother Jack was drowned in Ireland in August 1904, the young couple returned briefly to England. They then went back to South Africa, to Natal, where their second daughter was born. (They went on to have four more children.) From 1905 to 1908 Rutherford was a district surgeon and magistrate in the Orange River Colony. The couple returned to the UK and in 1909 he became a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons. He was appointed as a first assistant to the professor of anatomy in the school of medicine at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland in Dublin and was commissioned in the Officers’ Training Corps. From 1910 to 1911 he worked at Freiburg, Germany. During this period, he published several papers, including ‘A note upon the mechanical effects of a massive left-sided pleural effusion’ *Br Med J*. 1911 Oct 28;2(2652):1064, ‘A curious arrangement of the retro-clavicular musculature’ *Anat Anz* 1910 37 148-150 and ‘Human embryo of the fourth week’ *Trans Roy Acad Med Irel* 1910. He was subsequently appointed as a demonstrator of anatomy and lecturer on embryology under the anatomist William Wright at the London Hospital Medical College. At the outbreak of the First World War, Rutherford was called up to serve in the Royal Army Medical Corps, eventually becoming a lieutenant colonel. He served in the trenches, was buried alive and was awarded the Distinguished Service Order in 1917 for ‘conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty while in charge of an advanced dressing station’. On his return to England, he found his wife wanted a divorce. Major Miles Seton, a colleague from Edinburgh and South Africa, who had emigrated to Australia and returned to the UK, may have been his wife’s lover or confidant. On the evening of 13 January 1919 Rutherford went to the home of Seton’s cousin, Sir Malcolm Seton, in Holland Park, London, where he knew Seton was staying and shot his rival. Having committed the crime, he calmly waited for the police to arrive. At a sensational trial, Rutherford was found guilty of murder, but was declared insane and was imprisoned in Broadmoor Hospital. (The *Medical Directories* record his address as ‘uncommunicated’ during the years of his incarceration.) While at Broadmoor, Rutherford wrote *An outline history of the Great War* (Cambridge University Press, 1928), with the help and encouragement of Gordon Vero Carey and Hugh Sumner Scott. The Home Office refused to allow his name to appear on the cover, but he was acknowledged in a preface in the second edition. The book was sent to the Home Secretary Sir William Joynson-Hicks and may have expedited Rutherford’s relatively early release in 1929. Once he left Broadmoor, he was reinstated on to the Medical Register, but chose to practise abroad. He visited Canada, taught eye surgery in Vienna and then studied eye disease in Persia. Rutherford and his wife finally divorced in 1938. Alice remarried and died aged 100 on the Isle of Man. Rutherford did not remarry. In 1950, he retired to Coverham Abbey in Yorkshire. He then sailed to South Africa, to Kloopf in Natal. He died at St Mary’s Hospital, Pinetown District, Natal on 6 December 1951 at the age of 69. His granddaughter reported that, when he died in South Africa, he asked for his tin hat from the trenches to be buried with him. Sarah Gillam