Dame Rosemary Rue
Authors: Caroline Richmond
Journal: BMJ (2005)

Rosemary Rue championed the careers of women doctors, enabling them to train part time for specialist qualifications. This had previously been impossible, despite the shortage of qualified specialists. She oversaw the building of new hospitals in Swindon, Reading, and Milton Keynes, and she also helped found the Royal College of Physicians' Faculty of Community Medicine (now the Faculty of Public Health), becoming its first woman president.

She was born Elsie Rosemary Laurence in Essex in 1928. Her family moved to London when she was five, and at age 11 she was evacuated during the Blitz to stay with relatives in Devon, where she contracted tuberculosis and peritonitis. It was while she was convalescing that she decided on a career in medicine, entering the all-woman Royal Free Medical School in London when she was 17.

In 1950 she married Roger Rue, a pilot instructor in the Royal Air Force. When she told the medical school dean that she was changing her name, she was told that she could not stay at the school if she was married. She was instead accepted at Oxford, qualifying in 1951 after taking London University exams.

Her first job was at a long stay hospital in Cowley Road on the outskirts of Oxford. She did not tell her employers that she had a husband or a newborn son, after being rejected from hospitals elsewhere in Oxford on the grounds that they did not employ married women.

Rosemary was allowed one afternoon a week off for a psychiatry course. But the hospital sacked her on the spot when someone informed her bosses about the husband and the baby.

She moved into general practice in 1952 after being offered a job in Oxford's industrial district by a general practitioner from her psychiatry course. It was there, in 1954, that she contracted polio from a patient, becoming the last person in Oxford to get it.

The disease left her with one useless leg; even with her crutches and callipers she could barely walk or carry a medical bag. For a while she taught in a girls' school. When she went (by car) for interview for medical jobs, if she found that she could not climb the steps to the front door, she would phone and say that she had accepted another post.​post.




Figure 1



Credit: NICK SINCLAIR




By 1955 she and her husband had separated, and she went to live in Hertfordshire with her parents, whose general practitioner had recently had a leg amputated and needed a partner. He told her that he was pleased to find her—together they had two legs. She enjoyed the work, which was diverse and demanding, with plenty of home visits and home births. She was also medical officer to the Royal Air Force at Bovingdon, Hertfordshire.

In 1960 she became assistant county medical officer for Hertfordshire and a part time paediatrician in Watford. During this time she spent an academic term at the Institute of Child Health in London. Five years later, in 1965, she became assistant senior medical officer for the Oxford region, a highly progressive health authority, rising to become regional medical officer in 1973 and regional general manager in 1984.

When in the early 1960s the Macmillan government awoke to the fact that British hospital buildings were ancient, inadequate, and unevenly distributed around the country and allocated new money, Rosemary saw that Oxford got its share, and oversaw the building of new hospitals in Swindon, Reading, and Milton Keynes. Realising that all hospitals had basic architectural needs, such as the width of corridors and the utilities in the panel at the bed heads, she designed basic modules that could be incorporated into every hospital, so cutting down on architect bills.

Milton Keynes was the first modern hospital to be built from scratch. Rosemary saw the new town as a marvellous opportunity to build a health service that started from patients and general practitioners, with community services and hospitals to support them in an inverted pyramid, rather than working from the top downwards. She persuaded the government to cut the budgets of the London teaching hospitals to fund this, on the grounds that the capital's population was decreasing.

Rosemary Rue's most important contribution was the part time training scheme for women doctors who wanted to become qualified specialists. It started in Oxford and soon spread nationwide, and the women became known as “Rosemary's babies.” She had to persuade the royal colleges to cooperate with the scheme, convincing consultants that they could adapt their ways to accommodate it. It was—and remains—an unprecedented success.

In 1972 she became one of the founders of the Faculty of Community Health (now the Faculty of Public Health), which brought together academic bodies such as the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, community health doctors, and organisations such as the Public Health Laboratory Service. She was also a founding fellow of Green College, Oxford, and a one time president of the BMA, and she was awarded the Jenner medal of the Royal Society of Health.

She leaves two sons.

Elsie Rosemary Rue, former regional general manager and regional medical officer Oxford Regional Health Authority (b 1928; q Oxford 1951; DCH, FRCP, FFPHM, FRCPsych, FRCS, CBE, DBE), died from bowel cancer on 24 December 2004.