Diana Beck

Diana Jean Kinloch Beck (29 June 1900 or 1902 – 3 March 1956) was the first British female neurosurgeon. She established the neurosurgery service at the Middlesex Hospital in London. In 1952 she gained a public profile for performing life-saving surgery on A. A. Milne.

Early life and education
Diana Beck was born on 29 June 1900, or 1902,  in Hoole, Chester, to James Beck, a tailor, and Margaret Helena Kinloch. She attended The Queen's School before studying medicine at the London School of Medicine for Women, where she won two prizes and a scholarship. After graduating in 1925, she worked at the Royal Free Hospital as a house surgeon and then a surgical registrar throughout the 1930s.

Medical career
Beck chose to specialise in neurosurgery and trained under Hugh Cairns at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, where she also acted as a general surgeon providing treatment to injured soldiers during the war. In 1939, she was awarded the William Gibson Research Scholarship for Medical Women by the Royal Society of Medicine, and used the grant to undertake research in Oxford with Dorothy Stuart Russell. Using animal experiments, they investigated the causes of idiopathic intracranial hypertension and experimented with various graft materials for cranioplasty.

Beck was appointed consultant neurosurgeon at the Royal Free in 1943, but the next year the ongoing war forced her to move to Chase Farm Hospital and Bristol to provide neurosurgical advice to the emergency medical service for south-west England. She became a consultant neurosurgeon at Middlesex Hospital in 1947, making her the first female consultant at a London teaching hospital that did not admit women students. At Middlesex, she was the first woman and the first neurosurgeon on staff, as well as being the only consultant neurosurgeon in western Europe and North America at the time. Beck set up and ran the neurosurgery service at Middlesex, and published important research on the management of intracerebral haemorrhage.

In 1952 Beck received attention in the press for performing lifesaving surgery on A. A. Milne, the author of Winnie-the-Pooh, two months after he suffered a brain haemorrhage. The Times praised her "remarkable piece of surgery". According to his son Christopher, after the stroke and surgery he remained "partly paralyzed" with a "distinct change in character", though he survived a further three years.

First female neurosurgeon
A 2008 profile in Neurosurgery credits Beck as the world's first female neurosurgeon. The claim has also been made for the Romanian Sofia Ionescu, although the author notes that Ionescu only finished medical school in 1945, when Beck was already working as a consultant in neurosurgery.

Death and legacy
Beck suffered from myasthenia gravis and underwent a thymectomy in 1956 to treat a myasthenic crisis. She died at the Middlesex Hospital soon after the procedure from a pulmonary embolism on 3 March 1956. She is commemorated with a plaque in the Fitzrovia Chapel, part of the Middlesex Hospital.

Beck will be one of the recipients of an English Heritage blue plaque in 2024, alongside Christina Broom, Irene Barclay and Adelaide Hall.