{{short description|British paediatrician (1920–2016)}} {{Use dmy dates|date=June 2020}} '''Lilly Magdalene Suzanne Dubowitz''' (née '''Sebők'''; 20 March 1930{{spnd}}14 March 2016) was a Hungarian-born British paediatrician who together with her husband, the British neurologist Victor Dubowitz, developed the Dubowitz Score to estimate gestational age.
==Early life== Lilly Sebők was born in 1930 in Budapest, the daughter of Hedwig and Julius Sebők.<ref name=guardian>{{cite news |last=Mercuri |first=Eugenio |date=8 May 2016 |title=Lilly Dubowitz obituary |url=https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/may/08/lilly-dubowitz-obituary |department=Science |work=The Guardian |location=London |accessdate=23 June 2020}}</ref> Her father was a Jewish textile worker; he was sent to a Nazi labour camp during the Second World War while Lilly and her mother spent the war in hiding, using falsified papers from the Swedish embassy.<ref name=vass>{{cite journal |last1=Vass |first1=Géza |title=Dubowitz Lilly emlékére (1930. március 20.–2016. március 14.) |trans-title=In memoriam Lilly Dubowitz (20 March 1930 – 14 March 2016) |journal=Orvosi Hetilap |date=July 2017 |volume=158 |issue=28 |pages=1116–1117 |doi=10.1556/650.2017.HO2576 |pmid=28691882|url=http://real.mtak.hu/56303/1/650.2017.ho2576.pdf |language=Hungarian}}</ref> In 1948, Lilly and her mother migrated to Australia, where they joined her mother's family. She began working as a waitress and in a biochemistry laboratory while studying medicine part-time at the University of Melbourne, graduating in 1956.<ref name=guardian/>
==Medical career== In 1958, Sebők moved to London to take up a postgraduate position in endocrinology at Hammersmith Hospital. She met the South African-born neurologist Victor Dubowitz on Easter 1960; they were engaged two weeks later and married within three months.<ref name=vass/> Soon afterwards, husband and wife moved to Sheffield, where Lilly took up a temporary registrar post in paediatrics and discovered a strong interest in neonatology, the study of newborns. She began working on newborn research at night while caring for her own four young children during the day.<ref name=guardian/> She and Victor collaborated on the development of a tool to estimate the gestational age of a newborn by examining its neurological signs as well as anatomical features.<ref name=guardian/> The test, titled the Dubowitz Score, was published in 1970 and was rapidly adopted around the world for distinguishing mature but malnourished babies from premature babies who were appropriately small for their age.<ref name=guardian/><ref>{{cite news |title=Obituary: Lilly Dubowitz |url=https://www.thetimes.com/article/lilly-dubowitz-bgh8z2j9f |work=The Times |location=London |date=14 June 2016 |access-date=23 June 2020}}</ref> In the United States, to perform the test was known as "Dubowitzing the baby".<ref name=guardian/><ref name=chronicle>{{cite news |last=Tessler |first=Gloria |date=5 August 2016 |title=Lilly Dubowitz |url=https://www.pressreader.com/uk/the-jewish-chronicle/20160805/282484298142679 |work=The Jewish Chronicle |via=PressReader |accessdate=13 May 2020}}</ref>
Lilly and Victor Dubowitz returned to London's Hammersmith Hospital in 1972, where Lilly pioneered the use of cranial ultrasound and, later, magnetic resonance imaging to assess the brains of newborns.<ref name=chronicle/> In 1980, husband and wife collaborated again to develop a systematic method for the neurological examination of the newborn. Their assessment paid special attention to premature infants, who at the time were widely felt to be impossible to assess.<ref name=guardian/> Lilly Dubowitz continued working at Hammersmith Hospital until her retirement in 1995.<ref name=vass/>
==Later life== After her retirement, Dubowitz undertook an extensive investigation of her lost uncle, Stefan Sebők, an architect who had disappeared in Russia during World War II. Her research, which was gathered across three continents and came largely from KGB records, was eventually published in her 2012 book titled ''In Search of a Forgotten Architect''.<ref name=vass/> She died on 14 March 2016.<ref name=guardian/>
==References== {{Reflist}}
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Dubowitz, Lilly}} Category:1930 births Category:2016 deaths Category:20th-century British medical doctors Category:20th-century British women medical doctors Category:British paediatricians Category:British women paediatricians Category:Hungarian emigrants to Australia Category:Hungarian emigrants to England Category:Hungarian people of Jewish descent Category:Melbourne Medical School alumni Category:Medical doctors from Budapest Category:Physicians of Hammersmith Hospital Category:Jews who emigrated to escape Nazism