Dame Rosemary Rue

Champion of women doctors

Elsie Rosemary Laurence, medical practitioner: born Hutton, Essex 14 June 1928; Assistant County Medical Officer and part-time paediatrician, Hertfordshire 1960-65; hospital doctor, Oxfordshire 1965-73; Assistant Regional Medical Officer, Oxford Regional Hospital Board (later Oxford Regional Health Authority) 1965-71, Senior Assistant Medical Officer 1971-73, Regional Medical Officer 1973-88, Regional General Manager 1984-88; CBE 1977; seconded as Professor of Community Health, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine 1980-82; President, Medical Women's Federation 1982-83; President, Faculty of Community Medicine 1986-89; DBE 1989; President, British Medical Association 1990-91; FRCS 1994; married 1950 Roger Rue (two sons; marriage dissolved); died Stanton St John, Oxfordshire 24 December 2004.

Rosemary Rue, a former President of the Medical Women's Federation, founded the scheme that enabled women doctors to train part time to become specialists, thereby enhancing their lives, and their patients' lives, and solving the shortage of specialists. She also founded the Faculty of Public Health (now called Community Medicine), a medical college that brought together the various academic and in-the-field experts in this subject.

She was born Elsie Rosemary Laurence in Essex in 1928; her father was an accountant and her mother a music teacher. The family moved to London when she was five and Rosemary won two scholarships to Sydenham High School. She was evacuated during the Blitz to Devon, where, aged 11, she contracted tuberculosis and peritonitis, and spent a year in bed - and off school - following major surgery. When she was recovering she decided on medicine as a career. This desire was fuelled by frequent visits to an aunt who ran a girl guide company among underprivileged children in Hackney.

Despite the break in her education she went to the all-woman Royal Free Medical School when she was 17. She was in a clinic on the day in 1948 when the National Health Service started, and the consultant (male) finished his clinic and announced that he was leaving rather than practice socialised medicine.

In 1950 she married Roger Rue, an RAF pilot instructor of Belgian origin, and told the medical school dean that she was changing her name; the dean told her she could not stay if she was married. So she applied to the Oxford University Medical School, was accepted straight away, and qualified in 1951, taking London University exams.

Although it was not obligatory for newly qualified doctors to do a year's hospital work she chose to do so. In Oxford she hit a brick wall as the town's hospitals didn't employ married women. She found a job at an out-of-town long-stay hospital in Cowley Road when she didn't mention the marriage or the baby. She employed a nanny at home to look after her new-born son and shared a flat adjoining the hospital with another doctor, rushing home in her time off to breast-feed. Her flatmate, who was male and Ceylonese, helped her in so far as he could.

The hospital's senior doctors were inspirationally committed to patients and ruthless at disregarding red tape. Dr Lionel Cosin got bedridden patients back on their feet, and rehabilitated long-stay patients who had been written off. He also let Rosemary spend an afternoon a week taking a psychiatry course. It all ended when someone spilled the beans about the husband and the baby. She was sacked on the spot. The Ceylonese doctor was hit - by a senior doctor - for his presumption in sharing a flat with a white woman.

GP jobs were hard to find in 1952, but a GP who met Rue on the psychiatry course offered her a job in the industrial part of town. There, in 1954, she contracted polio from a patient. The disease was by then all but eradicated and she was the last person to get it in Oxford.

With one useless leg and barely able to walk with her calipers and crutches, or to carry a medical bag, she briefly taught chemistry and biology in a girls' school. She applied for medical jobs, drove to the interview, and if she was unable to get up the steps to the front door would phone and say she'd accepted another job.

By then - 1955 - she was separated from her husband and went to live with her parents in Hertfordshire. Their local, single-handed GP had undergone a leg amputation for cancer sarcoma and needed a part-time partner. At the interview he was hopping around on a pylon as he didn't find his artificial limb helpful, and he was pleased to find her: together they had two legs. General practice in 1955 was diverse and demanding: people gave birth at home, patients distrusted hospitals, and hospitals didn't want patients aged over 60. She was also medical officer to the RAF at Bovingdon.

She moved on in 1960, becoming Assistant County Medical Officer for Hertfordshire and part-time paediatrician in Watford. Here, she said, she learned the importance of properly integrated medical and social services, and spent an academic term at the Institute of Child Health in London. Five years later, in 1965, she was offered the job of Senior Assistant Medical Officer (Samo) for the Oxford region, a highly-progressive health authority. The Samos ran the country's health authorities.

In 1961, Enoch Powell, health minister in the Macmillan government, awoke to the fact that the nation's hospital buildings were ancient, inadequate, and unevenly distributed around the country. Rue saw that Oxford got its share of the new money, and oversaw the building of new hospitals, in Swindon, Reading and Milton Keynes.

She soon realised that all hospitals had basic architectural needs, such as the width of corridors and the gizmo in the panel at the bedheads, and designed basic modules that could be incorporated into every hospital, which cut down on architect bills and meant that the best designs were repeated everywhere.

Milton Keynes was the first modern hospital to be built de novo: entire teams of medical, nursing and ancillary staff had to start from scratch on the same day. The new town was also a marvellous opportunity to build a health service that started from the patients and GPs, with community services and hospitals to support them in an inverted pyramid, rather than working from the top downwards. Rue persuaded the government to fund this by cutting the budgets of the London teaching hospitals, arguing logically that they were having to tout for patients as the capital's population decreased.

Rosemary Rue's most significant contribution was to introduce a part-time training scheme for women doctors who wanted to become qualified specialists. It started in Oxford and soon spread nationwide. There was a shortage of medical man- and womanpower, and no part-time training posts for married women doctors. Introducing the scheme meant convincing the Royal Colleges, who oversaw training, to co-operate with the scheme, convincing consultants that they could adapt their ways to accommodate it, and making sure that the trainees' needs dovetailed with it all. The scheme was - and remains - an unprecedented success, and after two years she was pleased to note that the doctors had produced the same number of higher medical qualifications as they had babies.

In Oxford, she had been the first regional medical officer to recognise the public health threat of Aids and to insist that no blood was given for transfusion unless it had undergone the newly developed test for the virus.

Rue's other spectacular contribution was to found the Faculty of Public Health, part of the Royal College of Physicians and now the Faculty of Community Medicine, in 1972. This brought together academic bodies such as the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the community health doctors, and organisations such as the Public Health Laboratory Service. The faculty enabled the training and networking of public health doctors, and she recently argued that the reason that the Sars respiratory virus outbreak had been effectively stopped was that the director-general of the World Health Organisation, Gro Harlem Brundtland, was public-health trained.

She was elected to Fellowship of all the medical colleges, and received an Oxford honorary MA. She was a founding Fellow of Green College, Oxford and she was awarded the Jenner medal of the Royal Society of Health. She wrote papers on ward design, women in medicine, general practice, community hospitals, and individuals requiring security.

In an era when many doctors were suspended, usually for whistle-blowing, Rue suspended only one, a man who was subsequently imprisoned for sexually assaulting children. She served on national committees concerned with medical manpower, the 1967 Abortion Act, and organisation of work in hospitals. She did all this, and more, despite her disability from polio, which meant that she walked with a stick for much of her life and underwent several major operations.

She was respected and loved, and always understated her achievements. After her retirement in 1988, she was President of the BMA for a year, Vice-President of the Alzheimer's Society, Chairman of the Wyndham Housing Association in Oxford and of the Margaret Pyke Trust, which is concerned with family planning and sexual health.

Caroline Richmond