Beulah Bewley

Dame Beulah Bewley died from cardiovascular disease and dementia on 20 January 2018 at the age of 88 in London. She was survived by four children and her husband.

Her medical school, Trinity College, celebrated its tercentenary in 2011, and Bewley served on the tercentenary board from 2007 to 2012.

In 1982, she served on the Faculty of Public Health Medicine of the Royal College of Physicians of the United Kingdom.She served on the Royal Society of Medicine's section on Epidemiology and Public Health.

In Bewley's fourth year at Trinity College Dublin, she met a young psychiatrist, Thomas Bewley, from a Quaker family that owned Bewley's coffee shops. They married in 1955, and had five children. Their second daughter, born with Down Syndrome, defied early expectations regarding her health, and lived until the age of 44.

Aged five, Bewley decided that she wanted to become a doctor, and went on to qualify as a doctor at Trinity College Dublin in 1953. In 1955, she married Thomas Bewley and moved to England where she worked in paediatrics for fifteen years, before undertaking a MSc degree in social medicine at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, where she was the only woman in the class.

Dame Beulah Rosemary Bewley DBE (née Knox; 2 September 1929 – 20 January 2018) was a British public health physician and past-president of the Medical Women's Federation on the General Medical Council.

Bewley was born Beulah Rosemary Knox on 2 September 1929 in a Protestant family in County Londonderry, Northern Ireland, the second of three daughters of Ina Eagleson Knox (née Charles), who came from a wealthy family, and John Benjamin Knox, who worked for the Ulster Bank. Aged 14 she became a boarder at Dublin's Alexandra College.