Valerie Cowie obituary
My friend and colleague Valerie Cowie, who has died aged 99, was a pioneer in psychiatric genetics and the psychiatry of learning disability, and the only person I ever knew whose clinical and scientific training included both cytogenetics and psychoanalysis.
As a junior doctor at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary in the late 1940s, Valerie was one of the first to carry out dietary treatment of the genetic disorder phenylketonuria, showing that this could prevent the development of intellectual disability. She subsequently trained in psychiatry at the Maudsley hospital in London from 1952 until 1954, where she came under the mentorship of Eliot Slater, a pioneer in psychiatric genetics. Valerie herself studied babies with Down’s syndrome, being the first to describe detailed measures of their early neurological and psychological development.
By the late 1950s the work with Slater was flourishing and the group was expanding, with much of the work being funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC). Slater soon formed an independent MRC unit, with Valerie as deputy director. The unit was housed in a modest prefabricated building that attracted many academic visitors from around the world and was affectionately known as the Maudsley “Genetics Hut”. Slater and Cowie went on to write The Genetics of Mental Disorders (1971), the first English-language textbook on the topic.
Valerie was born in Wanstead, Essex, but raised in Harpenden, Hertfordshire, the only child of Lillian (nee
Coard), a clerical worker, and Leslie Field, who worked in accountancy. She won a scholarship to St Albans high school for girls and became head girl. As one of very few female students at medical school at the University of
Aberdeen, she quickly discovered that girls were not expected to follow a career in hospital medicine, never mind academia. Valerie, however, had other ideas. She had developed an early interest in psychiatry through reading Freud and, although she won prizes in several other subjects, she maintained her career goal.
As a medical student, she met John Cowie, who also became a psychiatrist. She and John married in 1947 and had three sons, one of whom died in infancy. They separated in 1967 and John died in 1970.
In 1987, after maintaining a busy clinical and research career, Valerie eventually received a much-overdue appointment as a professor, in the department of psychological medicine at the University of Wales College of Medicine (now part of Cardiff University). After retiring from the NHS and the university in 1989 she continued with private clinical work and was still active as a psychotherapist into her 90s.
She is survived by her sons, Robert and Jonathan.