Harold Ellis (surgeon)

Harold Ellis was an English surgeon and anatomist best known as a teacher. Born Henry Ellis in Stepney Green in 1926, he qualified in medicine at Oxford in July 1948, the month the National Health Service began, and served as a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps, where he cared for servicemen returning from the Korean War with severe spinal and head injuries. He held the foundation chair of surgery at Westminster Hospital from 1962 until 1989 and later became clinical anatomist at Guy's Hospital. He was professor of surgery at the University of London and professor in the Department of Anatomy and Human Sciences at King's College London, a vice-president of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, and president of the British Association of Surgical Oncology. He wrote the student textbook Clinical Anatomy, now in its fourteenth edition, and histories of surgery, and received the CBE in 1987. He turned 100 in January 2026 and died that March.