David Hirschowitz was born in Johannesburg in 1943 and spent his early years in South Africa and Zimbabwe. He studied medicine at Cape Town University, commencing in 1961 and, having been based at Groote Schuur Hospital, by a happy coincidence he graduated on the same day in 1967 that Christiaan Barnard performed the world’s first heart transplant in the hospital. After finishing his house jobs, he decided to move to the UK in 1968 as he found working with the apartheid system extremely distasteful. After initially training as a general surgeon, he began to specialise in orthopaedics and carried out a number of postings over a four year period in hospitals in Bethnal Green, North Middlesex, Hackney, Hampstead, Ascot and Slough. Having been given a surgical research fellowship, he spent a year from 1975 to 1976 in California at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA). At UCLA Professor Harlan C. Amstutz was working on a pioneering total hip resurfacing procedure which was first carried out in 1976. David was closely involved with the application of this new technique and also Amstutz’s new, cemented total hip replacement. He was appointed a consultant orthopaedic surgeon to the hospitals in St Albans and Hemel Hempstead on his return to the UK in 1977. He stayed in that area for the rest of his career and developed a reputation as a skilled surgeon, always happy to try out new techniques and popular with patients and his juniors. Outside medicine he enjoyed photography, cooking, horticulture and scuba diving. Enthusiastically adopting new technologies, he became adept at computer programming and wrote some specialist software for running medical practices which became very popular. His wife, Lynette, had met him in South Africa and, as his girlfriend, accompanied him to the UK where they married in 1969. He developed prostate cancer in 2009 and, with the help of chemotherapy and radiotherapy, survived until 2018 when lymphoma was diagnosed. He died on 11 February 2019, survived by his wife, sons Anton and Ivan and grandchildren, Isobel, Emily, Filip and Jacob.