Derek Henderson was a senior consultant oral and maxillofacial surgeon at St Thomas’ Hospital, London. He was born in London on 9 April 1935. Both his parents, Robert Henderson and Dorothy Edith Henderson née Spring, were civil servants. He attended Dulwich College, where he won prizes and scholarships, and went on to King’s College London to study dentistry, gaining his BDS in 1956. Whilst at King’s, he won the C E Wallis prize for an essay on Greene Vardiman Black, one of the founders of modern dentistry in the United States. Henderson held house surgeon appointments at King’s and the Royal Dental Hospital from 1956 to 1959. From 1958 to 1965 he was also a lecturer in dental materials at King’s. He became a fellow of the Faculty of Dental Surgery of the Royal College of Surgeons of England in 1960 and then decided to study medicine at King’s, supporting himself with the help of an entrance scholarship and by working as a general dental practitioner. He gained his MB BS in 1963. He was an ENT house officer and casualty officer in 1964. He then spent some months as a registrar with the oral and maxillofacial surgeon Norman Rowe at Queen Mary’s Roehampton and Westminster Hospital. From 1965 to 1967 he was a senior registrar in oral surgery at the new Cardiff Dental School. In 1967 he was appointed as a consultant oral surgeon to the Eastern Regional Hospital Board in Scotland and Dundee Dental Hospital and an honorary senior lecturer at the University of Dundee. In 1969 he moved to Glasgow, as the consultant in charge of the regional maxillofacial service to Glasgow and the west of Scotland, based at Canniesburn Hospital’s plastic and oral surgical unit. At Canniesburn he helped introduce new craniofacial procedures, notably the Le Fort II osteotomy and other operations on the mid and upper face. He was also the first to devise an effective computerised maxillofacial trauma assessment system and to institute an evidence-based photocephalometric planning approach for orthognathic surgery. In 1975 he moved to London, to St Thomas’s, as a senior consultant. He was also a consultant at St George’s Hospital and the Royal Dental Hospital and an honorary consultant at Charing Cross Hospital. He was also a civilian consultant to the Navy and Army. In 1985 he co-wrote *A colour atlas and textbook of orthognathic surgery: the surgery of facial skeletal deformity* (London, Wolfe Medical Publications), which won the Astra prize for the best medical textbook. He also wrote papers on general oral surgery and on facial and jaw deformities. At the Royal College of Surgeons of England he was a Hunterian professor in 1975, the Kelsey Fry adviser in postgraduate education from 1975 to 1980 and a member of the council from 1984 to 1986. At the Faculty of Dental Surgery at the Royal College of Surgeons of England he was an examiner for the FDSRCS examination, a member of the board from 1978 to 1986, a member of the executive committee from 1983 to 1986 and vice dean from 1984 to 1985. He was president of the Oral Surgery Club of Great Britain from 1992 to 1993, and president of the British Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons from 1994 to 1995. He travelled extensively as a visiting professor and lecturer and was much sought after to run courses. Outside his professional life, he enjoyed woodworking, cooking, and fly-fishing. He retired in 1993 and moved to Beynat in central France. Derek Henderson died on 9 March 2013 from carcinoma of the prostate and was survived by his wife Jenny (née Anderson), whom he had married in 1961, and his children Sarah and Jeremy.