Hugh Bentall

Hugh Henry Bentall FRCS (28 April 1920 – 9 September 2012) was a British surgeon who pioneered open-heart surgery.

He then joined the Royal Navy and served in Britain and on the hospital ship Empire Clyde in the Pacific Fleet, and later in Singapore treating liberated prisoners of war.

In 1962 he performed an operation to repair a "hole in the heart" which was filmed for the BBC TV series Your Life in Their Hands.

In 1966 he devised a procedure to treat a patient with Marfan syndrome, replacing the aortic valve and ascending aorta in a single operation.

Bentall taught at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School from 1959 as lecturer, from 1962 as reader and from 1965 as Britain's first Professor of Cardiac Surgery.