George Tupman received his medical education at Manchester, qualifying MB ChB in 1944. After serving with the RAMC in the second world war as lieutenant colonel and passing the Fellowship in 1952 he specialised in orthopaedics. After house posts and an appointment in the peripheral nerve injury unit at the Princess Elizabeth Hospital, Exeter, he took up a registrarship at the Lord Mayor Treloar Hospital, Alton. Later he was senior orthopaedic registrar in the Bath clinical area, before becoming consultant orthopaedic surgeon to the Scarborough, Bridlington and Malton Hospital Group and the Adela Shaw Orthopaedic Hospital, Kirkby Moorside. He moved to Nottingham in the 1980s and in 1988 was at the surgical limb fitting centre, Nottingham and a clinical teacher in the Faculty of Medicine at Nottingham University. He won the Robert Jones Prize in 1959 with an essay entitled *A study of bone growth in normal children and its relation to skeletal maturation*. This, with several other papers, was published in the *Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery*. Tupman died unexpectedly on 6 January 1994, survived by his wife Margaret and sons Peter, John and Simon.