Barbara Stokes

Barbara Stokes (20 December 1922 – 22 March 2009) was an Irish paediatrician and disability campaigner.

Early life and family Barbara Stokes was born in London on 20 December 1922. Her parents were Brigadier William Noel (died 1969) and Pauline Mary Stokes (née Reynolds). William was Irish, and her mother was English. Stokes would holiday in Ireland during the summer, and played in the Irish junior tennis championship as a teenager. She attended St Paul's Girls' School, Brook Green, London. Her uncle Adrian Stokes was a pathologist at University College London and Guy's Hospital, and it was from him that Stokes developed an interest in medicine with the two corresponding while he was in a remote area of west Africa conducting research. When Stoke's father retired from the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, the family returned to Dublin in the summer of 1939 and lived at Grianán, Baily, Howth. Stokes entered Trinity College Dublin in September 1939 to study medicine.