Harold Ellis, surgeon who taught anatomy to generations of doctors, dies at 100

Professor Harold Ellis, the British surgeon and anatomist whose textbook Clinical Anatomy has been studied by medical students around the world for more than six decades, died on 25 March 2026, shortly after celebrating his 100th birthday in January. The Royal College of Surgeons of England issued a statement on his death on 27 March, and the Jewish Chronicle published tributes three days later.

Ellis was born in January 1926 in Stepney Green in London's East End to Polish-Jewish parents; his father was a barber and his mother a dressmaker. He qualified in medicine at Oxford in 1948 and held junior posts in Oxford, Sheffield and London. During national service in 1950 and 1951 he served as a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps, treating soldiers with severe head and spinal injuries from the Korean War.

In 1962 he became the founding professor of surgery at Westminster Medical School, a post he held until 1989, with a particular interest in abdominal and breast surgery. His Clinical Anatomy, first published in 1960 and now in its fourteenth edition, became one of the best-known teaching texts in medicine, admired for linking the structure of the body directly to what doctors see at the bedside and in the operating theatre. After retiring from surgery he returned to teaching anatomy, first at Cambridge and then at King's College London, continuing to instruct students well into old age.

Ellis served as a vice-president of the Royal College of Surgeons of England and of the Royal Society of Medicine and was appointed CBE in 1987. Prizes in his name are awarded each year by the International Journal of Surgery and the Royal College of Surgeons. Tim Mitchell, the college's president, described him as a meticulous surgeon and a world-renowned educator and anatomist.