Valerie Cowie

Biography

Valerie Cowie was born in 1924 in Wanstead, Essex, but raised in Harpenden, Hertfordshire. She studied medicine at the University of Aberdeen, where she researched dietary treatments for phenylketonuria, being awarded her MD in 1951. Cowie trained as a psychiatry and neurology registrar at the Maudsley Hospital and the Bethlem Royal Hospital in London, and then took up a research position at the Maudsley, where she worked for 11 years at the Medical Research Council Psychiatric Genetics Research Unit, including as its deputy director. She was awarded a PhD for research into the development of babies with Down syndrome at Guy's Hospital. She also worked as an associate professor at the National Institutes of Health in the United States, and established an academic unit for psychiatric genetics at Ely Hospital, Cardiff. She was once described by a colleague as "one of the stars of modern psychiatry". When she was appointed a senior lecturer at the University of Wales in 1982, one of her referees for the job noted that "My only reservation is that the post of senior lecturer does not adequately do justice to her high academic status", arguing that a personal chair would have been more appropriate.

In 1947, she married John Cowie, a fellow psychiatrist. The couple met at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary. The University of Aberdeen's principal and vice-chancellor, William Hamilton Fyfe, wrote of Cowie: "It's fine to find someone going on with medicine and research in spite of a husband". Valerie and John Cowie had three sons together, one of whom died after three days. They were divorced in the 1960s and she had two further, short marriages. After her retirement from the National Health Service, she continued to work as a consultant at the Priory Hospital, Roehampton, into her late seventies, and she saw four or five patients in her home up until the age of 96. Her licence to practice was eventually revoked by the General Medical Council when, being housebound, she could not undertake the required continuing professional development. She died aged 99 on 7 July 2023.