Rosalinde Paul Hurley was born on 26 October 1917 in London, England.
Rosalinde Paul Hurley was born on 26 October 1917 in London, England, into a family that would encourage her intellectual pursuits despite the limited opportunities generally afforded to women of her generation in science and medicine.
Her early education set the stage for a career that would eventually see her rise to the top of the medical microbiology profession in the United Kingdom, at a time when very few women occupied senior positions within the Royal Colleges of medicine.
Her birth in the midst of the First World War came in an era when women's roles in medicine and science were still heavily circumscribed. Hurley's later achievements as a pathologist and microbiologist, and her eventual damehood, stand as testament to the way she overcame the era's gender barriers to become a leading voice in medical ethics and microbiology in Britain.