Born in Dublin on 2 April 1858 the son of Arthur Hill Griffith solicitor, and his wife Hannah Rose Cottingham. The family emigrated to Australia in 1872, and he was educated at Scotch College, Melbourne from his fourteenth to eighteenth year. He took his medical training in England, qualifying at the age of twenty-seven in January 1886, and then returned to Melbourne, where he built up a large general practice, and became in the course of his long life the best known and most respected family doctor in the Mentone district, where he lived at 15 Moorabbin Road. He was health officer and government vaccinator at Caulfield, and honorary medical officer to the Foundling Hospital at Beaconsfield. He was a member of the Victorian Medical Society. After retiring from practice he lived at Westbourne, Harkaway, Berwick, Victoria. Griffith visited London and in spite of his age studied the progress of English medicine in 1912 and again in 1928. After 62 years Membership of the College, he was elected "as a Member of twenty years' standing" to the Fellowship in 1948, on the proposal of Sir Alan Newton. Griffith married twice: (1) in about 1894 Annie Lau Graham; (2) in 1928 Alice Gilbert. There were no children. Griffith died at Melbourne on 14 January 1949, aged 90.