Dame Sheila Patricia Violet Sherlock DBE, FRCP FRCPE FRS HFRSE FMGA FCRGA (31 March 1918 – 30 December 2001) was a British physician and medical educator who is considered the major 20th-century contributor to the field of hepatology (the study of the liver). Early life Sheila Sherlock was born in Dublin on 31 March 1918, the only daughter of Violet Mary Catherine (née Beckett) and Samuel Philip Sherlock, an army officer then serving as a lieutenant in the 1st Cavalry Reserve. Her family moved from Ireland to London soon after her birth and she attended private schools in the city until her family moved in 1929 to the village of Sandgate, Kent. In Kent, she was educated at the Folkestone County School for Girls. In the early part of the twentieth-century female applicants to medical schools were at a great disadvantage, and from 1935 to 1936 Sherlock attempted to enter several English medical schools but was rejected. In 1936 she was accepted for a place to study medicine at the University of Edinburgh. Her ability became evident, and she graduated in 1941 finishing top of her year. She was awarded the Ettles Scholarship, being only the second woman to have done so. Career She remained in Edinburgh to take up the post of Assistant Lecturer in Surgery offered to her by Professor Sir James Learmonth, and published her first paper with Learmonth in 1942. She later recounted that Learmonth had taught her how to conduct and document research. In the same year she was appointed House Physician to Professor Sir John McMichael at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School, Hammersmith Hospital. In this post she worked on hepatitis, which she was able to continue from 1943 to 1947 with funding from the Medical Research Council and subsequently with the award of the Beit Memorial Fellowship. She was awarded her MD with a thesis on The Liver in Disease: with special reference to aspiration liver biopsy, receiving a Gold Medal from University of Edinburgh. She conducted research into portal hypertension, hepatic encephalopathy and ascites at this time. In 1947 she spent a year at Yale University's School of Medicine as a Rockefeller Travelling Fellow, working on carbohydrate metabolism and liver disease. She returned to London and in 1948 was appointed Lecturer in Medicine and Consultant Physician at Hammersmith Hospital. In 1951, aged 33, she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal