Roth was born in Brighton in 1882 the son of B M S Roth FRCS, FSA (1852-1915), who introduced the methods of Hugh Owen Thomas to London and was also a distinguished numismatist and himself the son of Matthias Roth MD (1819-91) an orthopaedic surgeon practising in Wimpole Street. Roth's mother, Mrs B M S Roth, was Anna Elizabeth, daughter of John Bright PC, MP. He was educated at Tonbridge School, Aberdeen University and the London Hospital, and during the war of 1914-18 was surgeon to the City of London Military Hospital. Immediately after the war he was orthopaedic surgeon at the Miller General Hospital, but in 1929 was appointed consulting orthopaedic surgeon to the North Staffordshire Royal Infirmary, Stoke-on-Trent, where he inaugurated the first fracture clinic and accident service, adding to it a special miners' clinic in 1939. He was also attached to the Burslem, Haywood and Tunstall War Memorial Hospital, and acted as a medical member of a Medical Appeal Tribunal and medical referee for County Court Circuit No 26. When he retired from his hospital appointments he became for a time ship's surgeon in the Ellerman lines M V Poona, with a home in Worthing and later in Edgbaston, Birmingham. An original member of the British Orthopaedic Association, he was of striking appearance and provocative personality. Outside his profession he was a keen bridge player, a collector of Chinese porcelain, and a supporter of Stoke City Football Club. He contributed numerous papers on orthopaedic subjects to the journals and published a textbook Orthopaedics for Practitioners in 1920. He married first, in 1911, Emily Harding Lauder by whom he had two sons, one of whom was killed on active service with the RAF in 1942 and who had taken the name Harding, and one daughter; and, secondly, in 1933 Iris Derbyshire who survived him but died in 1967. He died in a hotel at Richmond, Surrey on 29 December 1962.