Born on 11 August 1891 to John Shufflebotham, a Birmingham grocer, Hilda was educated at King Edward's High School for Girls and at the University of Birmingham where, with the reluctant consent of her father, she studied medicine. She graduated BSc in 1914 and MB ChB two years later, and obtained a wealth of practical experience, especially in obstetrics, during the war when many of her senior colleagues were away in the forces. She also held postgraduate appointments at the Birmingham and Midland Hospital for Women and the London Hospital. It is said that her competence so impressed her seniors that one of them offered to resign in her place if she could obtain her FRCS and this she did without difficulty in 1920. Soon after her appointment as consultant to the Maternity and Women's Hospital in Birmingham she acquired an enormous practice especially among her colleagues' wives. When, in 1943 Professor Sir Beckwith Whitehouse died, she was appointed his successor, holding the Chair of Obstetrics and Gynaecology in the University for the next eleven years. She had taken the MRCOG in 1935 and was made FRCOG the next year. She became President of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists in 1949 - characteristically insisting that her predecessor, the royal gynaecologist Sir William Gilliatt remain in office long enough to admit the Queen (now the Queen Mother) to the Honorary Fellowship. She was created DBE in 1951 and Honorary LLD of her own university in 1958. She married a colleague, Bertram Lloyd, in 1930 and their supremely happy marriage ended in 1948 when he died after a long period of ill health through which Dame Hilda nursed him with loving care. In 1949 she married Baron Theodore Rose (qv) with whom she had graduated in 1916. They retired early together to live near Ross-on-Wye. Baron Rose died in 1978 and Dame Hilda moved nearer to Birmingham where she continued an active social life in the University and hospital, even superintending all the details of her 90th birthday party before dying on 18 July 1982, one of the most distinguished women doctors of her generation.