Valerie Mary Thompson was a consultant gynaecologist at the Royal Free Hospital, London. She was born in Canada on 12 August 1923, the daughter of Harold M Thompson, an English engineer, and his wife Dora Thompson née Denton. As a small child she returned with her parents to the UK. She was educated at Huddersfield Grammar School and studied medicine at the Royal Free, qualifying in 1948. She was a house surgeon and casualty officer at the Royal Free and a resident medical officer at Queen Charlotte’s Hospital, London. She then became a senior registrar in the department of obstetrics and gynaecology at the London Hospital. She passed her examination for the membership of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists in 1953, gained her FRCS in 1958 and her fellowship of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists in 1969. She returned to the Royal Free Hospital as a consultant and a senior lecturer. She was an inspirational teacher of gynaecology to students and the junior doctors who worked for her. In 1959 she married the psychiatrist Sydney Clifford Brookfield Yorke, one of the leading Freudians of his generation and medical director of the Hampstead Child Therapy Clinic, where he worked with Anna Freud. They had two children, Rachel and John. Valerie Thompson died on 24 March 2012 in Didcot, Oxfordshire. She was 88.