A flamboyant character with an impeccable track record and a glowing CV, the gynaecologist looked set for a glittering career and was even described by a former patient as "very dashing, quite the Women's Weekly Hero".
He was regarded by his colleagues in Ashford as an eccentric character, who regularly arrived for consultations wearing riding boots and jodhpurs, and occasionally gave his patients carnations.
But in the inquiry report published yesterday, he was criticised for arrogance, lack of compassion and his "intimidating and frightening" manner with patients and junior staff, whom he regularly "belittled".
He claimed to be "the fastest gynaecologist in the south-east" after he performed seven hysterectomies in three hours and 40 minutes.
It was this attention to the speed rather than the quality of his work which led to his downfall - and to that of the hundreds of women he treated in the 16 years he worked at the William Harvey.
Mr Ledward obtained a degree in pharmacy in 1959 before becoming a mature medical student, but after a series of house officer, senior house officer and registrar jobs at hospitals across Britain, he was appointed senior registrar at the City and Women's hospital in Nottingham and clinical teacher at Nottingham university in 1975. He was also seconded to the Riyadh military hospital in Saudi Arabia in 1979, months before joining the William Harvey.
During his years in Kent he reaped lucrative fees for his extensive private work, based at various private hospitals, including St Saviour's clinic in Hythe.
Now 62 and living alone in Ireland, Mr Ledward has never made any secret of his love of the high life. He has a £750,000 bungalow and stud farm in County Cork, and a Rolls-Royce.
His careless attitude was evident even before Mr Ledward moved to Kent, according to the inquiry team chaired by Jean Ritchie, QC. "There was something slapdash and unmethodical in his character; an element of seeing what he could get away with," the report said.
Concerned GPs were said to have had deep worries about Mr Ledward early on, but most "tended to bury their heads in the sand".
By 1991 there was ample evidence that something was terribly wrong with his work but junior doctors and nursing staff were reluctant to speak out in a "closed and closet atmosphere where there was and probably still is a culture of junior doctors being reluctant to criticise their seniors". A nurse who planned to speak to the inquiry was told by her colleagues: "More fool you."
"It is our impression that everyone hoped that someone else would deal with Rodney Ledward," the report concluded, something which they blamed in part on his powerful and stubborn personality. "We found the analogy with Mr Toad very graphic," the inquiry team noted.
Although hundreds of patients have come forward to complain about Mr Ledward since he was struck off by the General Medical Council in 1998, only a handful of women complained at the time of their treatment.
Most thought they had just been unlucky, while many simply did not know how or to whom to complain, and others were too embarrassed to discuss intimate problems such as incontinence.
Yet, despite the huge number of complications, "it never seems to have crossed his mind that there was anything amiss with his technique. He seems to have been supremely confident in his abilities and actions," the report found.
His self-belief was not even shaken in 1993 when he was dismissed from his contracts at two private hospitals in Kent - the Buckland hospital in Dover, and the Chaucer private hospital in Canterbury - following complaints from patients.
It was not until 1996 that his colleagues at Ashford finally blew the whistle on Mr Ledward when they were unable to contact him as a patient he had treated lay bleeding to death. Even after he was struck off by the GMC for gross professional misconduct, some staff closest to him claimed he was the "victim of a vendetta".
Nevertheless, the Ritchie report, ordered in March 1999 by the then health secretary Frank Dobson, raised serious concerns not only about Mr Ledward's medical skills but also his surgical practice, accusing him of pressurising NHS patients to go private, asking patients to bring cash with them when they were admitted for surgery and having a cold and bullying attitude.
Among the litany of complaints against him were numerous cases of rushed and incompetent surgery, in which he repeatedly made mistakes that surgeons would normally expect to make only once or twice in their entire careers, numerous unnecessary operations, and damage to patients' bladders, kidneys and livers, about which they were never told.
The report also notes compaints about Mr Ledward's brutality in internal examinations - some of which were undertaken without gloves - and routine belittling of patients.
A woman was pressurised to have a caesarean birth five weeks early because he was going on holiday. She refused and went on to bear a healthy child. Another was attended by Ledward in riding clothes. Tapping his boots with a riding crop, he suggested her post-operative complications were her own fault and asked: "Who's a naughty girl then?"
A woman of 22 was told she had cancer which would kill her in six months if she did not have a hysterectomy. The operation was carried out but, the report says, there was no evidence that she had cancer.
Officials at East Kent NHS trust yesterday apologised to Mr Ledward's former patients, insisting that the lessons of his case had been learned.
But Mr Ledward, who gave only written evidence because he is reported to be suffering from terminal prostate cancer, was travelling to Spain for a holiday, insisting - as he has all along - that he has done nothing wrong.
