Joanna Marcia Catherine Zlotnik was a paediatric surgeon. Born on 26 July 1943 in Edinburgh, she was the eldest child of Izrael Zlotnik, an experimental neuropathologist and his wife Amelia née Vinestock. Educated initially at St Hilary’s School in Edinburgh, she then attended Boroughmuir Senior Secondary School where she was Dux of science and mathematics in her fourth and fifth years. At Edinburgh University, which she attended in 1960, she took honours in biology, psychiatry and chest diseases and graduated MB ChB in 1966. After house jobs at the Falkirk and District Hospital, the Eastern General Hospital, the Western General Hospital and the Royal Infirmary she left Edinburgh to take a post as demonstrator in pathology at the University of Bristol in 1969. After spending a year there she moved to Dorchester as a surgical registrar at the Dorset County Hospital and passed the fellowship of the college in 1971. Among her surgical mentors she listed; James Ross, John Cook, Philip Harris, F M Hanna and John Lekias. In 1972 she became senior registrar in neurosurgery and then paediatric surgery at the Royal Perth Hospital, Perth, Western Australia. On her return to London, she became a consultant in paediatric audiology at Queen Mary’s Hospital in Carshalton. She retired to Salisbury in Wiltshire. Outside medicine she enjoyed swimming and sunbathing, painting, music, opera, theatre, driving and walking. She died on 29 June 2014 aged 70.