Rowena Ryan was an ENT consultant at Northwick Park Hospital, London. She was born in East London, South Africa, on 4 February 1958, where her father, Cecil Crawford Lindsay Ryan, was serving as a diplomat. Her mother, Dorothy Hazel née Lampkin, had been a secretary. Her paternal grandfather had qualified at Trinity College, Dublin, and became a general practitioner in Bath. She was educated at Alexandra College, Dublin, where she won the Governors Association scholarship, and went on to read medicine at Trinity. After qualifying she held junior posts at the West Middlesex, Stoke Mandeville, Hammersmith and Addenbrooke’s hospitals, before becoming an ENT registrar at the Royal Ear Hospital and senior registrar at the Royal National Throat, Nose and Ear Hospital. She was appointed as a consultant ENT surgeon to Northwick Park and the Central Middlesex hospitals in 1996, where her principal interest was in paediatric audiology. She was an examiner for the intercollegiate FRCS (otol) and was chair elect of the ENT comparative audit group of the British Association of Otorhinolaryngologists - Head and Neck Surgeons. In 1989 she married Audoen Healy, a dentist, with whom she had a daughter, Greta, and a son, Duncan. Outside work and family, her passions were music, literature, foreign languages, squash and tennis. She died of cancer of the pancreas on 9 December 2005.