Professor Louis Solomon passed away unexpectedly from a heart attack on 19 August 2014 in the Bristol Royal Infirmary.

Louis grew up in Keimoes, a tiny village in what is now the Northern Cape Province of South Africa. His parents were both of Jewish Russian descent, his father from Ireland and his mother a Glaswegian lady who instilled in him a lifelong love of art and literature.

In 1941 he and his brother Nols were sent to boarding school in Cape Town. He excelled academically and won a scholarship to study medicine in Cape Town. Whilst still a medical student he met and married Joan, who was his constant companion for the next 66 years.

He chose to work as a houseman in Cape Town, and then in Baragwanath Hospital (a hospital for non-White people in those dark days of Apartheid). Three eventful years as a GP in a remote rural area followed. Louis would frequently be both the anaesthetist and surgeon in the same case. Following the death of the daughter of a friend from an ether anaesthetic, Louis bought the first anaesthetic machine for his local hospital and trained fellow GPs in how to give safe anaesthesia.

He elected to train as an orthopaedic surgeon, first at the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital, Stanmore, and then at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, working with Otto Aufranc.