In the course of a distinguished 30-year career the paediatrician Elizabeth Bryan achieved an international reputation for her expertise in the field of multiple births.

She co-founded the Twins and Multiple Births Association in 1978 to provide support and information to parents and professionals faced with the challenges - social, medical and emotional - associated with such births. She founded the Multiple Births Foundation (MBF) in 1988, and served as its director for a decade and then as its president.

She wrote several books about multiple birth and infertility, notably Twins, Triplets and More (1995) which was translated into several languages, and a well-received memoir, Singing the Life: The Story of a Family Living in the Shadow of Cancer (2007).

Elizabeth (Libby) Bryan was born in 1942 in Yorkshire, the eldest of three girls. Her father, Paul (later Sir Paul) Bryan, was awarded the DSO and the MC during his wartime service and became a Conservative MP, junior minister and a vice-chairman of the party.

Having interrupted her medical studies at St Thomas' Hospital, London, to help to look after her mother who was suffering with bipolar disease, Bryan finished her training at Scarborough Hospital.

Early in her career as a paediatrician in York she became interested in the problems facing parents of twins and triplets. She started the first Twins Club, now a nationwide network of support groups, and was a founder of the Twins and Multiple Births Association. Her ability to empathise with the families in her care won her great affection and in 1978, at her wedding to the writer and former diplomat, Ronald Higgins, 25 pairs of twins formed a guard of honour outside the church.

In London after her marriage she continued to devote herself to counselling anxious and bereaved families and to alerting colleagues to the need for better professional understanding of the psycho-social aspects of multiple birth. She established a specialist twins paediatric service, first in London, then in Birmingham and York, bringing experienced mothers in to support new parents and pioneering the use of volunteers in a clinical setting. She founded the Multiple Births Foundation (MBF), with very little funding and run initially from her secretary's desk, later in a Portakabin in the car park of Queen Charlotte's and Chelsea Hospital, where Bryan was a consultant paediatrician from 1979 until 2005.

Bryan's charm and her ability to get people to do things were matched by her enthusiasm - one colleague recalled her habit of rising at 5am, “so that having cleared your desk the night before, you would come in to find a pile of work waiting for you”.

The MBF is now an international authority on the care, development and special problems of families with twin and higher-order births.

The advent of IVF and other forms of assisted reproduction brought ethical dilemmas for clinicians and families. Well aware that disability and mortality rates were much higher than with single births, Bryan campaigned for a limit to the number of embryos that could be transferred in a single course of treatment. Recent legislation imposing such limits brought her great satisfaction.

Bryan became an internationally renowned and widely travelled expert in multiple births, bereavement and infertility, and was, for three years, president of the International Society of Twin Studies.

Bryan and her husband were not able to produce a family; as a paediatrician this was a cruel blow, and she and Higgins went on to write a book on infertility. She also served on her County Adoption Panel and was founder chairman of Herefordshire Home Start.

Bryan's mother had died young from bipolar disease, the same illness which would later strike her granddaughter, Alice Duncan, who took her own life at the age of 22. Bryan nursed her youngest sister, Bernadette Hingley - who was ordained one of England's first female priests in 1994 - and her father through terminal cancer and supported her other sister, Felicity, through two episodes of breast cancer.

These latter blows were no coincidence: all three daughters had inherited the BRCA1 cancer gene which gave each an 80 per cent chance of developing either ovarian or breast cancer. Once there was no chance of becoming pregnant, Bryan had her ovaries removed and, in 2002, underwent a double mastectomy. Three years later she developed pancreatic cancer.

It was this final, cruel irony that prompted her to write Singing the Life. As a family carer, medical doctor and now sufferer, she was in a unique position to describe the effect of a destructive and capricious gene on families. The book, the story of a family in the shadow of cancer, was a candid, personal account of illness and a thoughtful analysis of the moral and ethical implications of advances in genetic testing: do you want to know and what do you do with the knowledge once you've got it?

While Singing the Life was a book to inform, inspire and comfort patients, carers and professionals alike, it was also a celebration of family and the importance of friendship. Despite her demanding career Bryan kept her relationships in good repair: her professional colleagues were often lifelong friends; she and her husband entertained generously at their Herefordshire home; she relished family gatherings and regularly took walking holidays in Europe with friends.

Cancer, she said, was a better illness to have than many because it gave you time and it gave friends time to say things they would never have said when you were well. She is survived by her husband, Ronald Higgins.

Dr Elizabeth Bryan, paediatrician, founder of the Multiple Births Foundation, was born on May 13,

1942. She died on February 21, 2008, aged 65