Dame Beulah Rosemary Bewley was a reader in public health sciences at St George’s Hospital Medical School, London and a champion of women in medicine. She was born Beulah Rosemary Knox in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, the second of three daughters of John Benjamin Knox, a bank manager at Ulster Bank, and Ina Eagleson Knox née Charles, who was from a prominent, wealthy Ulster Protestant family. With her family, she moved to the Irish Republic, to Kilkenny, during the Second World War. At 14 she became a boarder at Alexandra College in Dublin, which, unusually, taught girls science.
She knew she wanted to be a doctor from an early age and in 1947 began studying medicine at Trinity College, Dublin. As a fourth-year student, she met the junior doctor Thomas Bewley at the city’s Adelaide Hospital. She qualified in 1953 and they married in 1955.
She later said the first part of her career, while she had her five children, was ‘unplanned and zigzag’, including part-time posts in general practice, baby clinics and family planning, and in hospital medicine in Dublin, Ipswich and London. These years included a period spent in Cincinnati with her husband, who was on a psychiatry placement.
In her early forties, Bewley decided to take the newly-established MSc in social medicine at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, a course run by the influential epidemiologist Jerry Morris. Her research on smoking among primary school children eventually led to an MD degree.
She became a lecturer in the department of community medicine at St Thomas’ Hospital Medical School. She later held posts at King’s College Hospital Medical School and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. From 1989 to 1993, she was a senior lecturer (then, from 1992, a reader) and consultant in public health medicine at St George’s Hospital Medical School and a postgraduate tutor in public health medicine for the South West Thames Regional Health Authority.
She was a member of the General Medical Council for 20 years from 1979 and served as treasurer from 1992 to 1999. She was a member of the executive council of the Medical Women’s Federation from 1979 to 1988 and president from 1986 to 1987.
Bewley was a fellow of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, the Royal College of Physicians and of the Faculty of Public Health Medicine. In 2000, she was made a dame in the New Year’s honours list for services to women doctors.
In retirement, she returned to playing the piano, and enjoyed taking opera holidays with her husband. With the help of her daughter Susan, an obstetrician, she wrote an autobiography My life as a woman and doctor, published in 2016 (Bristol, SilverWood Books).
Bewley was survived by her husband, three daughters, Susan (an obstetrician), Louisa and Emma, a son, Henry, and a granddaughter. One daughter, Sarah, who was born with Down’s syndrome and heart problems, predeceased her.
RCP editor
[London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine Alumni blog Obituary: Dame Beulah Bewley https://blogs.lshtm.ac.uk/alumni/2018/01/20/obituary-dame-beulah-bewley/ – accessed 30 April 2020; The Independent 13 February 2018 www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/beulah-bewley-public-health-professional-who-fought-a8206546.html – accessed 30 April 2020; The Guardian 22 February 2020; www.theguardian.com/society/2018/feb/22/dame-beulah-bewley-obituary – accessed 30 April 2020; The Lancet 2018 391 1570 www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0140-6736%2818%2930898-5 – accessed 30 April 2020; BMJ 2018 360 906 www.bmj.com/content/360/bmj.k906 – accessed 30 April 2020]