My mother, Lotte Newman, who has died aged 90, was a GP who, in the 1990s, became the second female president of the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP). She was also a leading light in the Medical Women’s Federation, which promotes the personal and professional development of female doctors and aims to improve the health of women and their families.
Lotte was born in Frankfurt am Main in Germany to Tilly Meyer and George Neumann, who were both doctors. The family fled from Germany to London to escape the Nazis in 1938 and two years later, aged 11, Lotte obtained a scholarship to North London Collegiate school. She gained a BSc at Birmingham University before medical training in London at King’s College and Westminster hospital medical schools, qualifying in 1957.
She worked first as a junior doctor at Westminster children’s hospital and then in general medicine at St Stephen’s hospital. In 1958, as a qualified GP, she assisted her father in his Edgware practice before, in 1961, establishing her own practice at the Cholmley Gardens medical centre in West Hampstead.
Seven years later, with a fellow doctor, Tony Antoniou, an assistant at Cholmley Gardens, she expanded the practice to include the Abbey medical centre in Abbey Road, north London. She was at the helm there for more than 35 years until she retired in 2005.
Lotte’s work with the RCGP began in 1972 when she became one of its examiners. She was elected a member of the RCGP council in 1980 and became the first president to be elected by a ballot of the entire college, holding the post from 1994 to 1997.
Throughout her time with the RCGP she worked tirelessly to make the body’s governance more female-friendly, ensuring that more women were on its committees, establishing creche facilities for college events and changing the times and structures of meetings to encourage younger female members to attend. She was president of the Women’s Medical Federation in 1987-88.
Aside from her links with the RCGP, Lotte held various positions with other bodies, including vice-president of the World Organization of Family Doctors, and medical director of St John Ambulance. She was appointed OBE in 1991 and CBE in 1998.
Lotte is survived by her husband, Norman Aronsohn, a company director whom she married in 1959, by four children, Simone, David, Alexander and me, and seven grandchildren.
