Thomas Fisher was born in Atherstone, Warwickshire on 8 July 1937, the first son of Dr Thomas Richmond Fisher, a general practitioner, and Margaret, née Owen. He came from a medical family, his grandfather, father, two uncles, an aunt and three cousins all being doctors. He was educated at Sherborne School and Birmingham University Medical School, where he qualified in 1960. After junior appointments at Birmingham General Hospital he worked at the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre in Oxford, where he came under the influence of Pennybacker, Trueta and Duthie. In 1969 he was awarded a research fellowship at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital. On his return to England he was appointed senior registrar at the Robert Jones and Agnes Hunt Orthopaedic Hospital in Oswestry. In 1971 he worked for a year with the World Health Organisation in Thailand, and in the following year he was appointed UK travelling fellow for the British Orthopaedic Association. He was made consultant orthopaedic surgeon at the North Staffordshire Hospital, Stoke-on-Trent, and senior lecturer at Keele University in 1973; shortly after he was one of six ABC travelling fellows to North America. His particular interest lay in the treatment of peripheral nerve injuries using the operating microscope, and he was the first surgeon in the country to successfully reattach a severed hand. A fine technician and by nature a perfectionist, he preferred to carry out an operation from beginning to end, and wrote: 'It is like making a cabinet: the satisfaction comes from doing it all from start to finish'. In his spare time he was an accomplished artist in water-colours and pen and ink, and he was also keen on mountaineering and chess. He married Sonia Fawdry, a nurse, in 1960 and they had four sons, one of whom became a doctor. He died on 16 June 1993 at the early age of 56 after a long illness, survived by his wife, sons and a grandson.