Harold Ellis (surgeon)


Harold Ellis, CBE, Mch, FRCS is an English retired surgeon. He was emeritus professor of surgery at the University of London and professor in the Department of Anatomy and Human Sciences at the King's College London School of Medicine.
He held positions as a vice-president of the Royal College of Surgeons of England and of the Royal Society of Medicine and was president of the British Association of Surgical Oncology.

Early life and education

Harold Ellis was born in Stepney Green in 1926, the youngest of four children to dress makers. He completed his early education from St Olave's Grammar School before gaining admission to study medicine at Oxford University Medical School.

Early career

Ellis qualified as a doctor from Oxford in July 1948, the same month the National Health Service began. He subsequently took up a post at the Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford before completing national service from 1950 to 1951 as a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps. During his military service, he was responsible for the care of servicemen returning from the Korean War with severe spinal and cranial injuries. Afterwards he continued his training as a surgical registrar in London, Sheffield and Oxford before taking up a post as senior lecturer in the University of London. In 1962, he took up the foundation chair of surgery at the Westminster Hospital, a post which he held until his retirement from practice in 1989. After a stint teaching anatomy in the University of Cambridge, he took up his present position in 1993.
Ellis is one of the most notable British surgeons of the past fifty years, renowned both for his inspirational teaching and as the author of the definitive student textbook Clinical Anatomy, now in its fourteenth edition.

Awards and honours

In 1986 Ellis delivered the Bradshaw Lecture on the subject of breast cancer.
The Professor Harold Ellis Medical Student Prize For Surgery is named after him, and has been awarded by the Royal College of Surgeons since 2007. The International Journal of Surgery has awarded the Harold Ellis Prize in Surgery annually since 2003.

Selected publications

  • Ellis, Harold and Mahadevan, Vishy. Clinical Anatomy: Applied Anatomy for Students and Junior Doctors . Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell..
  • Ellis, Harold and Abdalla, Sala. A History of Surgery. CRC Press..
  • Ellis, Harold. Operations that Made History. CRC Press..
  • Ellis, Harold, Calne, Sir Roy Yorke and Watson, Christopher. Lecture notes on general surgery . Oxford: Blackwell Scientific..
  • Ellis, Harold. Cambridge Illustrated History of Surgery . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press..
  • Kinirons, Mark and Ellis, Harold. French's Index of Differential Diagnosis: An A-Z . Hodder Arnold..
  • Ellis, Harold, Logan, Bari and Dixon, Adrian. Human Sectional Anatomy: Pocket Atlas of Body Sections, CT and MRI Images . Hodder Arnold..
  • Ellis, Harold and Watson, Christopher. Pocket Diagnosis in General Surgery . Wiley-Blackwell..
  • Ellis, Harold, Feldman, Stanley and Harrop-Griffiths, William. Anatomy for Anaesthetists . Wiley-Blackwell..