Clare Fowler

Clare Fowler is an English physician and academic, a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, who created the subspecialty of uro-neurology, a field that joins urology and neurology. She worked at the Middlesex Hospital and then at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery at Queen's Square in London, researching with clinical neurophysiology how nerves control the muscles used to pass urine. With colleagues she showed in the 1980s that urinary retention in young women was not simply a psychological or hysterical disorder, and that sacral neuromodulation, a form of electrical stimulation, could treat a significant proportion of them; the condition is named Fowler's syndrome after her. In 1987 she founded the Department of Uro-Neurology at the National, led trials of treatments for urinary retention, and helped bring botulinum toxin injections into use for overactive bladder. She became professor of uro-neurology in 2001, received the St Peter's Medal of the British Association of Urological Surgeons in 2010 and her CBE in 2012, and retired in 2015 as emeritus professor at the Institute of Neurology, University College London.