Born at Leeds on 10 November 1870, the second child and second son of Thomas Arthur Sowry and Elizabeth Stead, his wife. He was educated at the Leeds Grammar School and the Yorkshire University, Leeds, where he won the Akroyd scholarship. He then entered St Bartholomew's Hospital, and acted as clinical assistant in the orthopaedic department, filling similar positions at the Royal London Ophthalmic Hospital and at the Central London Hospital for Diseases of the Throat, Nose and Ear. At the London University he took his degree with honours in anatomy, medicine, and midwifery. In 1890 he settled at Newcastle-under-Lyme and rapidly built himself an extensive practice. He was elected assistant physician to the North Staffordshire Royal Infirmary and nine years later was appointed physician. He retired under an age limit in 1929 and was then appointed a vice-president and honorary physician. He gave up general practice in 1919 and devoted himself entirely to consulting work. He had been president of the North Staffordshire division of the British Medical Association and president of its Staffordshire branch. He was also physician in charge of the experimental oxygen chambers at the North Staffordshire Infirmary for the Medical Research Council, and was consulting physician to the Staffordshire Orthopaedic Hospital. He married on 23 June 1904 Stella Caddick. He died after a long illness on 12 March 1933, survived by his widow and a family of four boys and two girls. He was buried in the cemetery at Newcastle-under-Lyme. Sowry was neither a speaker nor a writer, but he did excellent work in committee, and was instrumental in establishing a pay department at the North Staffordshire Infirmary, and in organizing the "oxygen wards" in the Infirmary, which proved of use for soldiers gassed in the first world war.