Donald Ross (surgeon)

It was in 1968 that Donald Ross led the team of doctors (including Keith Ross (no relation) and Donald Longmore and the anaesthetist Alan Gilston.) and nurses at the National Heart Hospital in London in the United Kingdom's first heart transplantation. The operation, on a 45-year-old man, lasted 7 hours. The patient survived for another 46 days before dying from what was described at the time as an "overwhelming infection."

Ross's greater achievement was the development, in 1967, of what has been termed the Ross procedure, or pulmonary autograft for aortic valve disease.

Despite early promise, homografts had a limited life span of around 8 years. The pulmonary autograft, now widely known as the Ross procedure, first performed in 1967, was the logical development of the homograft: it involves replacing a patient's damaged aortic valve with his or her own pulmonary valve.

In 1962 Ross introduced the use of homografts to replace diseased aortic valves. He used a technique of subcoronary implantation developed in the laboratory by Carlos Duran and Alfred Gunning in Oxford.

Dr Brock, in charge of surgery at Guy's Hospital, took on Mr Ross as a cardiovascular Research Fellow (1953) and later as Senior Thoracic Registrar (1954). Four years later, in 1958, Ross was appointed Consultant Cardiothoracic Surgeon, and subsequently Consultant Surgeon, National Heart Hospital in London (1963), and Senior Surgeon there (1967). In 1970, he was made Director of the Department of Surgery at the Institute of Cardiology, London.

Ross has recalled eagerly accepting the scholarship: once in England he took up a career in surgery and became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons (1949) within two years instead of the usual three. Working initially in Bristol he focused on chest and oesophageal surgery, and then began to include early cardiac surgery, such as on the ductus arteriosus. He was appointed Senior Registrar in Thoracic Surgery, Bristol, in 1952.

He began his medical career enrolling as a student at the University of Cape Town, training first as a dedicated scientist and subsequently as a doctor. He graduated (BSc, MB, ChB) in 1946 with first-class honours and the university gold medal. He had also received a two-year overseas scholarship which allowed him to further his studies in the United Kingdom.

Donald Nixon Ross, FRCS (4 October 1922 – 7 July 2014) was a South African-born British thoracic surgeon who was a pioneer of cardiac surgery and led the team that carried out the first heart transplantation in the United Kingdom in 1968. He developed the pulmonary autograft, known as the Ross procedure, for treatment of aortic valve disease.

Donald Ross was born in Kimberley, South Africa, on 4 October 1922. His parents were Scottish. He matriculated from Kimberley Boys' High School in 1939.