Britain's first neurosurgeon commemorated

An English Heritage blue plaque honouring Britain’s first female neurosurgeon Diana Beck, who trained and worked at the Royal Free Hospital (RFH), is being unveiled today. 

Beck studied medicine at the London (RFH) School of Medicine for Women. She graduated in 1925 and became the senior house surgeon in 1930, before becoming the surgical registrar, demonstrator in anatomy and lecturer in surgical and applied anatomy. Beck worked and taught at the RFH throughout the 1930s, with students known to give up their weekend plans to attend her enormously popular Saturday ward rounds. 

She became an “unusually senior” house surgeon, before being appointed consultant neurosurgeon to the RFH in 1943, although Beck could not take up the post as the wartime crisis in hospital provision required her to work elsewhere - at Chase Farm Hospital.

The plaque is being unveiled today at her former home and consulting rooms at 53 Wimpole Street in Marylebone. Beck lived here from 1948 to 1954 during the majority of her time at Middlesex Hospital, where, as its first neurosurgeon, she created and ran a neurosurgical department. 

Beck achieved many more firsts in her career. She was among the first female neurosurgeons in the world and was said to be ‘very conscious, and also proud’ of being the first woman appointed to senior clinical position at any of the major London teaching hospitals. 

Dr Susan Skedd, blue plaques historian at English Heritage, said: “At the time that Diana Beck chose to specialise in neurosurgery, it was a very new and revolutionary field of medicine. For a woman, it was even more ground-breaking. It seems most fitting that she should be commemorated at her home in Wimpole Street, where she lived during the pinnacle of her career, just half a mile from Middlesex Hospital.”

It was also while living in this house that Beck would have operated on her most famous patient: Winnie the Pooh author and fellow blue plaque recipient A. A. Milne who suffered a stroke in 1952. The Times described Beck’s life-saving operation as ‘a remarkable piece of surgery’.

Gillian Smith, chief medical officer of the Royal Free London, said: “We are proud to count Diana Beck as one of our trailblazing former medical students and neurosurgeons. She was a true pioneer and we’re so delighted to see her commemorated in this way.

“As the first institution in Britain to train women in medicine, the Royal Free Hospital drew aspiring female doctors from across the globe and we’re immensely proud of this part of our history.” 

In 1887 the Royal Free Hospital became the first hospital in London to accept women medical students.

Picture credits: 

Plaque, courtesy of English Heritage; Painting, courtesy of Phyllis Bliss (Dodd) and The Queen's School; Photograph, courtesy of The Medical Women's Federation.