Britain’s first female neurosurgeon, Diana Beck, will receive a blue plaque 99 years after becoming a doctor. The English Heritage plaque will be unveiled at her former home and consulting rooms at 53 Wimpole Street in Marylebone on Thursday (5^th September). Beck lived here from 1948 to 1954 during the majority of her time at Middlesex Hospital, where – as its very first neurosurgeon – she created and ran a neurosurgical department. Beck achieved many more firsts in her career – she was among the first female neurosurgeons in the world – and was said to be ‘very conscious, and also proud’ of being the first woman appointed to senior clinical position at any of the major London teaching hospitals.

Dr Susan Skedd, Blue Plaques Historian at English Heritage, said: “At the time that Diana Beck chose to specialise in neurosurgery, it was a very new and revolutionary field of medicine. For a woman, it was even more ground-breaking. It seems most fitting that she should be commemorated at her home in Wimpole Street, where she lived during the pinnacle of her career, just half a mile from Middlesex Hospital.”

It was also while living in this house that Beck would have operated on her most famous patient: Winnie the Pooh author and fellow blue plaque recipient, A. A. Milne, who suffered a stroke in 1952. The Times described Beck’s life-saving operation as ‘a remarkable piece of surgery’.

53 Wimpole Street is in Westminster’s Harley Street Conservation Area, a premium medical area since the middle of the nineteenth century. Although there are already six plaques in Wimpole or Upper Wimpole Street, only one of them is to a woman – Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, later Browning. Three of them are for medical practitioners, including the recent plaque to J. S. Risien Russell, the pioneering neurologist, at number 43 Wimpole Street.

The English Heritage London Blue Plaques scheme is generously supported by David Pearl and members of the public.