John Thompson Rowling was a consultant surgeon in Sheffield at the Royal Hospital and later the Royal Hallamshire Hospital. He was born in Leeds on 11 March 1921 into a family whose medical connections dated back to Elizabethan times. His father, Herbert Samuel Thompson Rowling, was one of the old school family doctors with a special interest in anaesthesia. He was a pioneer in his specialty and worked with Lord Moynihan. Rowling’s mother, Mary Elizabeth Roberts, was a nurse. His elder sister, Dorothy, became an orthopaedic surgeon. He was educated at Monkton Combe School and then, prior to entering medical school, obtained a BA degree in natural sciences from Queens’ College, University of Cambridge. He undertook his clinical training in Leeds, taking his finals in Cambridge in 1946, qualifying with his MB BChir. His first jobs after qualifying were in the Leeds area. Subsequently, he decided to enrol for National Service. He wrote: ‘…this could have been postponed or avoided, but having had a relatively safe war, it was just to accept it’. He served valiantly in the Royal Army Medical Corps, reaching the rank of major and was mentioned in despatches. He was sent to Malaya before obtaining his final FRCS diploma and was posted to remote parts of the country. He worked in the jungle as a single-handed surgeon with an anaesthetist. He wrote: ‘…we were inexperienced, but we learnt rapidly. On the whole we managed very well. The hospital was not designed for surgery of any sort, but we managed certain adaptations. The operating light in theatre was a wooden home-made frame holding six bulbs powered by a small generator. There was no X-ray, pathology or biochemistry.’ He used his ingenuity to build a suction unit in theatre by connecting a long tube to the operating table from the induction manifold of a vehicle parked outside the building. In these dangerous and challenging conditions, he performed a very wide range of emergency and elective surgery. He dealt with wounds of every part of the body, but the majority and most challenging were the penetrating wounds of the abdomen necessitating laparotomies. He fulfilled Hippocrates’ teaching that ‘He who wishes to be a surgeon should go to war.’ On his return to the UK, he was appointed as a registrar in Liverpool and as a senior registrar in Aberdeen and Leicester. He became a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1952 and completed his MChir in 1959. In 1960 he received his MD degree from the University of Cambridge with a thesis entitled *Disease in ancient Egypt: evidence from pathological lesions found in mummies.* He obtained the post of consultant surgeon in Sheffield and retired from the NHS in 1986. He was a very astute clinician and a versatile surgeon who was comfortable operating in any region of the body. B J Fairbrother, a former consultant surgeon who was his registrar in 1973, writes: ‘…his surgery was radical and precise, with most of the dissection being done with the scalpel. The tissue planes simply opened up, displaying the anatomy as I had only seen before in textbooks. He certainly didn’t believe in scratching around.’ He was aggressive and ahead of his time in the management of malignancies. He introduced the use of perioperative chemo-radiotherapy and of the isolated infusion of chemotherapy into the liver. He was also a pioneer in endovascular surgery. In the early days of aortic aneurysm surgery, he devised and constructed a machine to wire aortic aneurysms that he used with success in a few patients and he visited Geoffrey Slaney in Birmingham, who had recently returned from the States, to optimise his aortic aneurysm surgical technique. He was an international expert in paleopathology, wrote on ancient Egyptian medicine, with his work cited in books and articles. His writings also included other subjects, ranging from medicine to philosophy and religion, and he was a regular contributor to the Sheffield students’ and doctors’ journal *North Wing*. ‘JTR’, as he was known at work, was an erudite man of superior abilities and varied attainments. He was a Latin, Greek and English literature scholar. He was a talented and accomplished engineer. He constructed models, installed the heating system in his house and repaired his own vehicles. He flew aeroplanes, sailed in small boats and rode a motorcycle well into his eighties. He was a man of high moral standards, scrupulously honest and a committed Christian who lived by his beliefs. JTR was a complex, eccentric character with a strong mind of his own who occasionally held unconventional opinions and he could be misunderstood by some. However, the people who understood his idiosyncrasies were faced with a multi talented, very kind and generous man. He was modest, self-effacing and underrated, and was held in the utmost affection by the people who worked with him. He was the devoted husband of Elizabeth Marion (née White), whom he married in 1951 in Penang. She predeceased him in 2005. They did not have any children. Rowling died in Sheffield on 27 July 2019 aged 98.