Timothy Herbert

Timothy James Herbert was born on 11 July 1941 in England. Wikipedia gives his birthplace as Sheffield, while the curriculum vitae published by the International Wrist Arthroscopy Society names Nottingham.

He was educated at Repton School in Derbyshire from 1953 to 1958 and studied medicine at St Bartholomew's Hospital Medical School in London from 1959, qualifying MB BS (London) in 1965. He was an orthopaedic house surgeon at Barts before joining the Royal Navy, where he served as a Surgeon Lieutenant Commander and surgical specialist from 1966 to 1970.

After the navy Herbert was a surgical registrar at St Stephen's Hospital in Chelsea and then trained in orthopaedics on the St George's Hospital scheme in London from 1972 to 1975, under Alan Graham Apley. He became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England in 1971, won the Raine Prize at St George's and was briefly senior registrar at the Rowley Bristow Orthopaedic Hospital in Pyrford.

As a trainee he noticed how many scaphoid fractures failed to heal in plaster. Because the scaphoid lies inside the wrist joint and is covered in cartilage, the plates and headed screws then coming into use were unsuitable. With a young hospital engineer he developed a headless screw whose leading thread has a greater pitch than its trailing thread, so the bone fragments are compressed as the screw is driven in and the implant can stay buried in the bone. The Herbert screw became generally available in 1978, and his paper with W. E. Fisher, Management of the fractured scaphoid using a new bone screw, appeared in the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery in 1984. It is used for scaphoid fractures and for other small bone fractures and fusions.

Herbert moved to Sydney in 1976 as senior lecturer in orthopaedics at the University of New South Wales and became a Fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons the same year. He was a visiting surgeon at Sydney Hospital from 1979 and in its hand unit from 1985 to 1996, and was founding chairman of the Department of Hand Surgery at St Luke's Hospital, Sydney, from 1990 to 1996. He was also a visiting consultant at the Centre for Hand and Upper Limb Surgery at Wrightington in England. He stepped back from operating in 1996, at 55, and remained emeritus consultant in hand surgery at Sydney and St Luke's hospitals until 2006.

He was president of the Hand Surgery Society of New South Wales, wrote The Fractured Scaphoid (Quality Medical Publishing, 1990), and was an honorary member of the British Society for Surgery of the Hand, the Institut de la Main in France and the International Wrist Arthroscopy Society, and a corresponding member of the American Society for Surgery of the Hand.

Herbert was married to Heidi Herbert, an Austrian born photographer. They had three children, Natasha, Nicola and Alexander.

After retiring the couple made their home at French Farm, near Akaroa on Banks Peninsula in Canterbury, New Zealand, where Herbert ran a vineyard. The Press profiled the pair at home in 2026 in its Our Kiwi Home series.

Timothy Herbert died on 3 October 2026, aged 85. His death was announced through Bell, Lamb and Trotter, funeral directors in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Earlier in 2026 he had told The Press that he was diagnosed with terminal oesophageal cancer in January and had chosen radiotherapy to try to shrink the tumour, hoping to make one final trip to Europe. A formal cause of death was not stated in the funeral notice.

The Herbert screw was one of the first headless compression screws, and its principle of differential thread pitch was widely adopted and refined in later implant designs. Headless compression screws are now a standard way to fix scaphoid fractures.

His work also helped establish early internal fixation of acute scaphoid fractures, letting many patients avoid long periods in plaster, an approach that later became the subject of large clinical trials. Through his book The Fractured Scaphoid and his leadership of hand surgery at St Luke's Hospital, Sydney, he shaped the training of a generation of hand surgeons.