Herbert Tibbits

Herbert Tibbits was a British doctor and prolific medical author whose work focused on electro-therapeutics, massage, and related treatments. Records for his books show that he published works including A Handbook of Medical Electricity, Handbook of Medical and Surgical Electricity, and How to Use a Galvanic Battery in Medicine and Surgery, and he also translated Duchenne's A Treatise on Localized Electrization.

He was closely associated with several London medical institutions. Sources connected to his publications describe him as having served at the National Hospital for the Paralysed and Epileptic and at the Hospital for Sick Children, Great Ormond Street. A hospital history also credits him as the founder of the West End Hospital for Diseases of the Nervous System, Paralysis and Epilepsy, which opened in 1878.

Tibbits is remembered today as a figure from the energetic, sometimes controversial world of late Victorian medicine. Archival records from the Royal College of Physicians and The National Archives show that his advocacy of electrical treatment later became tied to disputes over commercial electrotherapy devices, a reminder that his career stood at the border between serious medical innovation and the more doubtful health fashions of the age.