Doreen Ashmel Birch was born at Bloemfontein, South Africa, on 28 November 1926, the only child of a lawyer. She was educated at the University of Cape Town where she qualified MB ChB in 1949. She came to England for postgraduate study and obtained the Edinburgh Fellowship in 1957 and the FRCS in 1961. She was research assistant to Michael Boyd, Professor of Surgery, Manchester in 1955 and published a paper on micro-electrophoretic studies in post-operative patients with R P Jepson who was later Professor of Surgery in Adelaide. She married Dr J C McCaffrey in 1963, by whom she had one son. She practised at Mount Gambier, South Australia, where she died in October 1975.