My mother, Betty Norman, who has died aged 95, was a paediatrician who gave up medicine to bring up a family in the 1950s. She became a relentless campaigner for children with learning difficulties after the birth of her third son. Thomas was born with Down’s syndrome, and she followed medical advice to send him permanently into residential care at 11 months old.
Betty was born to an eminent Dutch lawyer, Willem Bisschop and his wife May (nee Cowen), a seamstress. Her great-grandfather was one of Napoleon’s marshals, the Dutch general Herman Willem Daendels. Her father left Holland to escape religious austerity and practised at Middle Temple. She was brought up with her sister, Jenny, in Lincoln’s Inn and went to Queen’s college, Harley Street, west London, and then, in 1940 Somerville College, Oxford, to study medicine.
Oxford in the war proved austere: many of the young men had left, and food and coal was rationed. To stay warm, students shared rooms to study. Punctuality was not Betty’s strong point: “Always elegant, never on time,” was her tutor’s assessment.
In 1944, at the Wingfield Morris hospital, she treated the abscesses caused by chronic tuberculosis infection, and upon qualifying the following year became a houseman at the Radcliffe, where she injecting wounded servicemen twice daily with life-saving penicillin. As the reused needles were often blunt the penicillin team were the most unpopular people on the ward.
Keen to specialise in treating children, in 1947 she joined the Queen Elisabeth children’s hospital in London’s poverty-stricken East End. From there she went two years later to Great Ormond Street children’s hospital as a registrar, and met Archie Norman, her future husband, who became an eminent consultant paediatrician.
When Thomas went away, she embarked on her long campaign for children with disabilities, first as chair of the Friends of Royal Earlswood, where Thomas lived from the age of seven, and subsequently on the East Surrey health authority and as vice chair of Mencap. She was distraught to find how poor and outdated was some of the care. Always brave and sometimes stubborn, she fought many battles with the health authority to modernise facilities which would have been considered unacceptable for patients with no disability. Later, as the new “care in the community” policy closed homes, she campaigned with Lord (Brian) Rix, then chair of Mencap, to retain the best of the communal activities.
Her life was devoted to children, as a doctor, campaigner and mother of five sons, all born within eight years and brought up largely alone, as Archie worked long hours. But they had a rock solid partnership for 66 years until Archie’s death in December, aged 104.
Betty is survived by her sons, Duncan, Thomas, Sandy, Donald and me, and by seven grandchildren.
