Obituary: Professor Monty Losowsky, doctor

Professor Monty Losowsky, who has died at 88, was instrumental in the creation and development of the Thackray Medical Museum at St James’s Hospital in Leeds, for which received an award for his services to the city.

The museum was established in 1997 with funding from the Lottery Heritage Fund and private charitable donations, and it was Prof Losowsky who obtained permission to open it in a disused Grade II listed Victorian hospital block.

An award-winning institution, it now maintains a collection of more than 35,000 objects and 14,500 books, and runs a programme of education for children.

The child of two undocumented Jewish immigrants, Prof Losowsky was brought up in the East End of London by his illiterate, widowed mother as a young compatriot of Harold Pinter, Lionel Bart, and Arnold Wesker, whom he remembered from that time.

He also recalled the first V2 doodlebug bomb landing at the end of his street during the war, and hiding with his mother and sister in a shelter nearby. As an evacuee, he attended 14 different schools during the conflict, yet he managed to not only go to university, but also to become one of the most successful doctors and administrators in the North of England.

He attended university in Leeds, studying medicine. He worked in Paris and at Harvard, researching alongside Roger Bannister, but he came back to Leeds in the early 1960s, and remained there. It was after his return that he was sent by Leeds University to St James’s, to investigate turning it into a teaching hospital. Under his oversight as the university liaison, it became the largest teaching hospital in Europe, and the subject of the long-running Yorkshire TV series, Jimmy’s, on which he occasionally appeared.

He became a briefly familiar face on the TV news, when he was the doctor in charge of treating the late TV presenter, Russell Harty in the 1980s, a period in which he became friends with the playwright Alan Bennett.

He was a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, a member of the General Medical Council, the Dean of Medicine and Dentistry at Leeds University, where he turned around a failing medical school, President of the British Society of Gastroenterology, and chairman of both the British Liver Trust and the Coeliac Society.

He married Barbara Malkin, of Malkin’s Bakery, in 1971. They had two children, Kate and Andrew.