Rita Auden was a favourite niece of the poet WH Auden and among the first women to be appointed a consultant general surgeon in a London teaching hospital.Born at Simla,her childhood in India left her with keen memories of poverty and disease;she also grew up with a gratitude for the sunlight and luxuriant beauty of her surroundings.Her parents were exceptionally intelligent,reflective and complex individuals.John Auden,her father,was a geologist who had spent the 1930s mapping the Himalayas and was responsible in the 1940s for surveying all major dam sites,hydro-electric projects and irrigation systems in India.Her mother,formerly Sheila Bonnerjee,was a granddaughter of the first president of the Indian National Congress and the daughter of a barrister who had been educated in England and knew Latin and Greek better than his native Bengali.Rita first met her famous uncle when he visited Calcutta in 1951.In May 1965 Rita married Peter Mudford,who became an English literature academic at London University; the marriage was celebrated by her uncle with his poem Epithalamium.They were married for 20 years,and after their divorce he remained her closest friend.There were no children.After graduating from St Anne's College with a degree in Physiology,Rita chose to complete her medical training at the London Hospital in the impoverished district of Whitechapel.As a physician she achieved a rare combination of intuitive attentiveness to her patients' feelings with conscientious clinical precision.For her, healing was a matter of humane care as well as of medical cure.In the late 1960s she decided to become a surgeon.At that time the Royal Free was unique among the London teaching hospitals in employing women as general consultant surgeons.Other teaching hospitals had no women in those posts,and indeed few women consultants at all.Her surgical training included a year at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast,where she operated on car-bomb and gunshot casualties,and a period in a field hospital during the Vietnam war.She never forgot the sight of a five-year-old who had lost both his legs or of the Vietcong prisoners chained to their beds.She was admitted as a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1972.In 1984 she suffered a serious mental breakdown from which she never fully recovered.Three years later she was forced to retire from medicine.