Corisande Smyth was a pioneering reader in orthodontics at the University of London and one of the first women to become a fellow of the Faculty of Dental Surgery of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. She was born in Wimbledon in January 1902 but lived most of her life in Middlesex, where her father, Samuel Baker Smyth, was a chartered accountant. She was educated at Clarendon School, Malvern, an independent girls’ boarding school. Sadly, her sole brother Leslie was killed in Flanders in 1916 and her father died in the following year when Corisande was only 15, leaving her widowed mother Minnie Eliza Smyth to care for her two daughters. Nevertheless ‘Sandy’, as she would become known to her colleagues, won an entrance scholarship to the Royal Dental Hospital School of Dental Surgery, which had only recently agreed to accept women students. Indeed, the Royal College of Surgeons of England records her ‘college’ as being the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine for Women, which suggests that she was initially a preclinical student there. At the Royal Dental she won a prize in dental anatomy and produced her first published paper as a student (‘Practical application of dental anatomy’ *Royal Dental Hospital Magazine* 1923; 2). On qualification she was appointed as a house surgeon in the children’s department and immediately joined the British Society for the Study of Orthodontics, of which she would remain a member until she died. During the next six years while working in practice at Wimpole Street she produced six further publications in the British Society for the Study of Orthodontics’ *Transactions* and was probably also working unpaid part time in the children’s department, where already her gift for teaching had been recognised, but it was not until 1930 that she was appointed as a demonstrator in orthodontics at the Royal with funding provided by the Dental Board of the United Kingdom (£500 for five years). Shortly after this a new department of orthodontics was created at the Royal with Norman Bennett as its first lecturer. He would later be knighted for his services to dentistry. According to him at that time ‘most of the systematic teaching especially of technique and principles of treatment was undertaken by Smyth with assistance from myself by way of lectures and class teaching in diagnosis’ (*Br Dent J* 1936; 61:478). Clifford Ballard, the first professor of orthodontics at the University of London, and John Hovell, who were both to play highly significant roles in the development of British orthodontics over the next 40 years, were taught by Miss Smyth at the Royal. Hovell records: ‘Her wide orthodontic experience and sympathetic personality and deep interest in orthodontic teaching and research made her ideal for this post…. Having been taught by her myself I know well what an inspiration she has always been to the students of the Royal Dental’ (*Br Dent J*, 1953; 95: 32). Miss Smyth was an active member of the British Society for the Study of Orthodontics, the European Orthodontic Society and the odontology section of the Royal Society of Medicine. She served as a councillor on all three societies, was editor of the *European Journal of Orthodontics* for seven years and librarian of the British Society for the Study of Orthodontics for six years. She also undertook a large share of the organisation of the Second International Orthodontic Congress, held in London in 1931. In 1951 she became the first reader in orthodontics of the University of London, shortly after her former student Clifford Ballard became its first professor, thereafter ensuring close cooperation between the Royal and the Eastman Postgraduate Dental Institute in the development of postgraduate teaching of orthodontics. Miss Smyth made a significant contribution to published orthodontic research and literature. Amongst her better-known works were anthropometric research for the dental committee of the Medical Research Council in collaboration with Matthew Young, anthropometric research in Dublin, and research on the Bidford collection of Anglo-Saxon skulls in Birmingham with J C Brash. She was one of only four women to be elected to the fellowship of the Faculty of Dental Surgery of the Royal College of Surgeons of England when it was introduced in 1948. But for her premature death, she would doubtless have received the diploma in orthodontics, without examination, when it was established in 1954. Sadly, she had suffered from ill heath all her life and it was at the 1953 European Orthodontic Society conference held in Monte Carlo, where she was due to present a paper, that her acute suffering made it imperative that she be flown home, where she died a few days later, greatly mourned by all who had known her.