Rosalind Hurley

Dame Dr. Rosalind Hurley, DBE, LLB, MD, FRC, FRCPath, FRCOG (30 December 1929 - 30 June 2004) was knighted by the British government for her services to medicine, science and law.

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She was:

• a) Professor Emerita of Medical Microbiology at the Institute of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Imperial College School of Medicine, London
• b) Honorary Consultant Microbiologist, Queen Charlotte's Maternity Hospital
• c) Member of the Board of the Public Health Laboratory Service (PHLS)

She was both a professor and consultant medical microbiologist, researcher, and ethicist, as well as being a barrister; she applied her legal training and expertise for the benefit of her medical, and especially her microbiological, practice.

Born in England on 30 December 1929 to a Catholic family (see [1]), her early education was at the Academy of the Assumption in Massachusetts. She and her brother had been sent to the States during the Second World War to live with a friend of her father. She returned to Britain in 1948 and studied medicine at Charing Cross Hospital Medical School while at the same time studying law. In four years she qualified in medicine (LRCP, MRCS and MBBS in 1955) and became a Barrister at Law. She took the Diploma in Literature of the University of London in 1956 and won the Gilchrist Prize and the Churton Collins Prize in Literature while a pre-registration house officer at the Wembley and West London hospitals.

She was called to the Bar at the Inner Temple in 1958 and was awarded LLB in 1959 while a lecturer and assistant clinical pathologist at Charing Cross Hospital and Medical School. Her medical thesis on perinatal candida infections led to a sustained interest in mycology. Her contributions soon spread well beyond Queen Charlotte's, for example when she became a member of the PHLS Board. It was at a time when the Service's infectious diseases surveillance role was becoming more prominent and its recently created Communicable Disease Surveillance Centre was growing.

By the 1980s the PHLS needed to have an ethical review of its own research projects, but also to be advised on the ethics of its broader programmes of disease surveillance and vaccine evaluation. Professor Hurley established a committee that reported to the Board but operated independently of it. After she had completed two terms as a Board member, Dr. Hurley continued as the Ethics Committee chair until the mid-1990s.

In 1964, around the time she became a consultant, she married the neurosurgeon Peter Gortvai, a neurosurgeon at St Bartholemew's and Romford hospitals. They had no children. In later life he suffered from heart disease but had the good fortune to survive a burst aneurysm, being in a cardiologist's waiting room at the time. He died around 1997.

Dr. Rosalind Hurley Gortvai died on 30 June 2004, aged 74, from undisclosed causes.