Robert Alexander Roxburgh was born on 26 November 1929 in London at 5, Redington Road, Hampstead. He was the son of Archibald Cathcart Roxburgh FRCP, a consultant dermatologist, and his wife Mary née Lambert, whose father had been a colonel in the 2nd Dragoon Guards. He was the youngest of their four children and all three boys became doctors. Archibald Roxburgh wrote a well known textbook of dermatology *Common skin diseases* (Taylor and Francis, 19th ed 2021), which was first published in 1952 and became the standard work for many years. A great uncle had been a sometime house surgeon to Lord Lister in Glasgow. Robert attended St. Ronan’s preparatory school in Worthing and, during the second world war, was evacuated with the school to Bicton House, East Budleigh in Devon. He then went to Stowe School of which his uncle had been the first headmaster. He studied medicine at Cambridge University and trained at St Barthlomew’s Hospital (Barts), graduating MB, BCh in 1953. At Barts he won the Wix prize for a biography of Sir Thomas Smith, a former vice-president of the college. While there he acknowledged that it was Sir Geoffrey Keynes who first aroused his interest in becoming a surgeon. He did various house jobs at Luton and Dunstable Hospital, Leicester Royal Infirmary and St James in Balham, finally becoming a senior registrar at the Middlesex Hospital. During his postgraduate years he acknowledged the influence of Ernest Reginald Frizelle, Norman Cecil Tanner and Richard Samson Handley. In 1960 he passed the fellowship of the college and that of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh. He was appointed consultant surgeon to the Broomfield Hospital in Chelmsford and was also surgeon to the Springfield Medical Centre also in Chelmsford. He married Muriel Jones in 1954 and they had two sons and two daughters. Outside medicine he was a keen gardener. He died on 6 February 2019 aged 88.