My aunt Mariella Fischer-Williams, who has died aged 96, was a neurologist, accomplished musician, author, and guardian of the family history, who was passionate about Lamledra, the house on the south Cornish coast built by her parents in 1911.
With her husband, Patrick Werner, Mariella spent winters at Lamledra from the 1990s until 2009, when her health began to fail. The couple, and her sister, Jenifer Hart, cared for the fabric of the house, albeit with radically differing views on paint colours, gardening and repairs.
Mariella was the youngest of four daughters of Sir John Fischer-Williams and his second wife, Marjorie Murray. Her father, an international jurist, was British legal representative on the reparations commission set up after the first world war, and from 1920 to 1930 the family lived in Paris. Her mother was a talented artist; Mariella later gave her paintings, etchings and sketches to Falmouth Art Gallery. Mariella’s mixed inheritance of artistic creativity and dedication to scientific logic strongly influenced her whole life.
Abandoning her violin studies when the second world war began in 1939, Mariella volunteered as a nurse, and in 1947 qualified as a doctor. She held various neurology posts in Edinburgh, Birmingham, Oxford and London but, on failing to be appointed as a consultant (which she attributed to the power of the male medical establishment), she moved to the US in the early 60s, and spent the rest of her career there. She held consultant posts in Minnesota (at the Mayo clinic) and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where she co-wrote A Textbook of Biological Feedback (1986).
She met Patrick through hiking and they married in 1974. This brought her much-needed stability, a Milwaukee home and walking holidays in north American wildernesses, where they camped well into their 70s.
After retirement, Mariella typed out her parents’ extensive wartime correspondence, creating a valuable archive, continued to play her violin and write poetry, and planted a community wood near Lamledra.
She remained a forceful personality, admired for her achievements and generosity, if sometimes displaying a single-mindedness and lack of insight into others’ feelings that were at odds with the arguments in her book Emotions of a Physician (1993). This volume was her testimony to the importance of doctors’ awareness of their emotional responses to patients or, as she called it, “the land of ambivalence”.
Despite slowly developing dementia in the last eight years of her life, Mariella continued to converse in French and to enjoy company and the garden.
Jenifer died in 2005 and Patrick in 2012. Mariella is survived by nine nieces and nephews, 23 great-nieces and great-nephews, two step-children and three step-grandsons.
