Romola Diane Dunsmore was a consultant ear, nose and throat (ENT) surgeon in Doncaster and a former president of the Medical Women's Federation. She was born on 20 May 1923, the daughter of Thomas and Annabella Dunsmore (née Wildgoose). She went to four different schools, as her tax inspector father moved around the country for work, including Leeds Girls' High School and then, from 1939 to 1941, Merchant Taylors' Girls' School in Great Crosby, near Liverpool. She studied medicine at the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine, London, from 1941 to 1946, including time in Exeter, to which the school had been evacuated during the war. In Exeter, she volunteered as a fire warden, and found herself abseiling from the roof of Exeter Cathedral as part of her fire safety training. Her first recollection of doctors and illness was at the age of six, when she was living in Skipton, North Yorkshire. She woke in the middle of the night feeling hot and aching all over. She had scarlet fever, and remembered being wrapped in a very scrubby red blanket and taken by horse-drawn ambulance to the local fever hospital. There, she was put into a large bath, which had been repainted after the original enamel had chipped off. She could still remember the discomfort of the sticky uneven paint on the bath and the room in which her hair was carefully searched with a fine-tooth comb. She was put to bed, and attempts were made to paint her throat with glycerine and rose-water. She made up her mind that this was an indignity she would not tolerate and kicked and screamed until the nurses gave up. Romola stayed in the hospital for three weeks and for the remainder of that winter had to wear Chilprufe combinations and a body belt to keep her kidneys warm. Whilst she did not know whether this experience influenced her choice of career, she did think that it might have helped her to be a more understanding doctor. Many years later in the 1960's, when she was an ENT consultant in Doncaster (also in Yorkshire), she learned of children who had become very upset following a tonsillectomy, as they had had to stay in hospital for a week and had been allowed only one hour-long visit in that time. (The children were her nieces, then aged seven and four: decades later, they still remember the trauma they experienced.) In but one example of her drive to improve medical conditions, she changed the rule against visitors for child patients under her own care, no doubt to the great benefit of children and parents alike. After qualifying, Romola stayed at the Royal Free Hospital, first in surgery and then in obstetrics and gynaecology, before switching to ENT in 1948. She found ENT rewarding and exciting, particularly as the patients were of all ages and both sexes, which increased the variety of presentations. It is unlikely that her switch was due to prejudice against women working in obstetrics and gynaecology at the time. However, prejudice prevailed. Amongst her letters is one written three decades later in which the writer, writing from Harley Street, told her that he was sure women would be wiser to accept that there were useful jobs to be done in anaesthetics, radiology and pathology, jobs well suited to running a home and looking after a family. His wish was that more women would accept this, rather than '…banging their heads against the very difficult wall of general medicine, general surgery and obstetrics and gynaecology'. Romola achieved her FRCS in 1962, after posts in various hospitals around the British Isles, from London to Aberdeen. Although she found the primary exam very challenging, she sailed through the more clinically based part two with no trouble at all. During her earlier years, she was most closely associated with Sir Douglas McLaggan, Charles Keogh and E G Collins. She had in that time extensive experience of endo and microscopic work, having assisted Josephine Collier in the surgery of the facial nerve, and assisted at many major laryngeal and cervical operations. During her time in Aberdeen, Romola was visiting consultant (by boat) to the Orkney and Shetland Islands, and maintained a long-term friendship with one of the women there, who would knit her Fair Isle jumpers, which were worn on hill walks for many, many years. As a consultant in Doncaster, she shared a one in two on-call with Philip Beales, the otologist. Romola focused on head and neck surgery, including collaboration on major cases with the dental surgeons. She was one of the first surgeons to use laser for laryngeal surgery. She took pride in her well-managed list, which ensured that patients were able to see her much more quickly than the established norm. Children were always a favourite, and to her death she kept the toys she had used to entertain them and to test their hearing. She recalled her marvellous secretaries and, with less pleasure, her office, thick with smoke. Romola joined the Medical Women's Federation (MWF), in which she played a very active role for many years. She became its president in 1979, although the untimely death of her predecessor, Mary Duguid, meant that she had in effect acted as president whilst president-elect. Her election coincided with a need to find a substitute venue for the 1980 conference of the Medical Women's International Association (MWIA), which had been due to take place in Tehran, Iran. Due to the difficulties in Iran at the time and problems communicating with the MWIA's Iranian president-elect, Liossa Pirnia (who it was later discovered had left the country), the 1980 conference had to be moved to the UK at short notice. Romola took on the challenge, and a very successful meeting was held instead at the Metropole Hotel, Birmingham. During her time as president, and for a good number of years afterwards, in her role on the executive committee and council of the MWF and as chairman of its careers committee, Romola led the MWF response to the Government's consultations on the medical staffing structure of hospitals. She had long thought that there needed to be better training of doctors, both during their training period and afterwards. She felt there was a need both to encourage those suited to a long-term role in medicine (particularly women) and to discourage those for whom medicine proved not to be a suitable career, enabling them to change track without an accompanying sense of failure. She also wanted recognition that being a doctor required more than just technical expertise, believing that empathy and teamwork were of equal importance. She wanted more consultant roles to be made available, and the numbers of registrars to be reduced in consequence, so that doctors could progress to the top of the profession (and settle in a fixed location) and more patients could be treated by someone at the top of the medical tree. She advocated for more part-time roles at all levels, and refused to accept that women should be pigeon-holed into sub-consultant roles because they might need, for a short stage in their career, to give priority to their families. The MWF faced strong resistance, despite Romola's written and oral submissions to the Government (the Short committee) on its behalf, which were praised for their balanced concern for the welfare of patients, staff and the public alike. In 1983, in her role as president of the Yorkshire Association of the MWF, Romola led the MWF's spring council meeting and annual general meeting in York, and was proud to meet the Duchess of Gloucester, its patron. At that time the MWF was the biggest professional organisation of women doctors in the country with over 3,000 members. She retired to Settle and later Kendal, where she enjoyed the hills, established gardens reflecting her very considerable plantswoman's skills, attended concerts and entertained her many friends and relatives with her cooking and wide-ranging interests. On her retirement, and again in the few weeks prior to her death, Romola received very many messages praising her professionalism and kindness. She was an inspiration to many, including her nephews and nieces and their families, who admired and loved her in equal measure. She died on 30 May 2016, just after her 93rd birthday.