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.
[2] 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.
[1] 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.
Ross has recorded how Belsey, the oesophageal surgeon in Bristol with whom he was working, took him to Guy's Hospital in London to see Sir Russell Brock attempt to split open a calcified aortic valve.
Throughout his early training, moreover, he had felt a lure toward chest surgery and cardiology because they seemed to be the most active specialities in an era when very little could be done for a patient with heart disease of any type.
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).
The benefits of the procedure were that it did not require lifelong anticoagulation with its attendant risks, and it could grow proportionately with the patient, making it suitable for use in children.
[1] Outside of his medical pursuits, Ross bred Arabian horses, and he had been a devotee of the theatre, opera, and, particularly, chamber music at the Wigmore Hall.