He was born in London, 1903, the son of Herbert Brock, a master photographer, and his wife, Elvina (née Carman).

[3][4] Brock was elected to a Rockefeller travelling fellowship and worked in the surgical department of Evarts Graham at St. Louis, Missouri, 1929–30.

He returned to Guy's as surgical registrar and tutor in 1932 and was appointed research fellow of the Association of Surgeons of Great Britain and Ireland.

He won the Jacksonian prize of the Royal College of Surgeons of England in 1935 and was elected a Hunterian professor in 1938.

Horace Smithy (1914–1948) of Charlotte, revived an operation due to Dr Elliott Cutler of the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital using a punch to remove a portion of the mitral valve.

Charles Bailey (1910–1993) at the Hahnemann Hospital, Philadelphia, Dwight Harken in Boston and Russell Brock at Guy's all adopted the finger fracture technique first used by Henry Souttar in 1925.

Many thousands of these "blind" operations were performed until the introduction of heart bypass made direct surgery on valves possible.

[5] Inspired by exchange professorships between himself and Dr Alfred Blalock of Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, Brock also introduced new developments, notably hypothermia and the heart-lung machine, as they emerged, enabling operations to be performed directly.

Knowing that Brock was supposed to be a difficult man with a big reputation, Kirklin offered him the chance to scrub up and stand in the theatre but he said, "No, no, no.

Contributed important papers on cardiac and thoracic surgery to medical and surgical journals and textbooks.

[3][4] He was responsible for the discovery and restoration, on the Guy's site, of an eighteenth-century operating theatre which was formerly part of the old St. Thomas's Hospital[11] In 1927, he married Germaine Louise Ladavèze (died 1978).