Lancelot Newton Dowie was born in Aberdeen on 13 August 1930, the son of Alexander Morrison Dowie, a banker and his wife Frances Elena née Newton. He had a brother who later became a GP in Scotland. After attending the Glasgow Academy he trained at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, qualifying in 1954. While at Barts he won the Hayward prize and was mentored by Dennis Ellison Nash, Sir Clifford Naunton Morgan, John Cope and James Cecil Hogg. He did house jobs at Barts and at the King Edward VII Hospital for Officers in London and, in 1962, became a fellow of the college. From 1969 to 1989 he headed the ENT department at Barts, moving to the Princess Grace Hospital in London when he retired from that post. He was a visiting professor at the University of California in the USA and an examiner for the DLO part 1. A fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine, he was secretary to the section of laryngology and a member of the British Association of Otolaryngology. He was the author of numerous articles published in the ENT journals During his national service he served with the Royal Navy as a surgeon lieutenant commander and was attached to an amphibious warfare squadron at Suez in 1957. He married Sine Audrey née Buttar, a nurse at the Westminster Hospital, on 2 April 1960. They had two sons and a daughter who became a nurse at St Thomas’s. He was a keen rugby player in spite of breaking his neck playing full back for Barts in 1948 and he played tennis in the University Hospital team. He died on 16 September 2018, aged 88 and was survived by his children (including a son named Mark) and grandchildren. His wife, who had been born in 1936 and was 77 when she died, predeceased him in 2014.