Monty Losowsky, who has died aged 88, played a crucial role in the establishment of the largest teaching hospital in Europe, St James’s in Leeds, a task he performed with the quiet authority, modesty and calm that were his hallmarks.
A distinguished consultant, he was the opposite of the domineering caricature, slight in build with a gentle voice that lowered the temperature at tricky committee meetings and held lecture theatres silent so that everyone could hear.
Never a bow-tie or pinstripe man, he was described by the author Alan Bennett, who became a friend when Losowsky was treating the TV presenter Russell Harty in 1988, as looking like someone who had come to mend the ward’s radiators. Harty’s hepatitis B proved fatal, but Losowsky’s persistent transparency with the media, in spite of initial gross intrusion, established trust and became a model for handling similar high-profile cases. My admiration for him, as a journalist, then became friendship.
He was born in London’s East End, where his parents, Solomon and Dora (nee Gottlieb), whose families had fled pogroms in Poland in the 1900s, worked in tailoring. The second world war played havoc with Monty’s education as successive evacuee billets saw him shuttle between 14 different schools. But the challenges brought out the best in him, and in later life he recalled the kindness he experienced in the temporary homes he stayed in. Once he found a bit of continuity at the Coopers’ Company school in London he became a star pupil there.
Monty’s early medical career, after qualifying at Leeds University in 1955, included stints in Paris and at Harvard University in the US, where work in the celebrated liver unit at Boston City hospital set him on the specialist path in which he would make his name.
On his return to Britain from Boston in 1962, Monty became a consultant at Leeds General Infirmary and set up a clinical research unit into liver disease. He was then asked to look at the possibilities of extending teaching to what became St James’s university hospital, and in 1969 became professor of medicine there, charged with starting academic departments in the muddle of redbrick buildings around the city’s former workhouse.
The project flourished and he helped to guide it until his retirement in 1996, in the process transforming the hospital from being an also-ran into its current eminence.
He was dean of the university’s medical school between 1989 and 1994 and appeared in Jimmy’s, ITV’s “real life soap opera”, which ran from 1987 to 1997 and added to the hospital’s fame. He wrote more than 350 research papers, served as president of the British Society for Gastroenterology, and helped to found the Coeliac Society, now Coeliac UK.
Retirement did not end his devotion to Jimmy’s: he played a crucial role in the creation of the Thackray Medical Museum there, which was based on the hospital campus.
Monty’s other interests included bold DIY projects and conducting history tours around St James’s.
He is survived by his wife, Barbara (nee Malkin), a teacher of deaf children whom he married in 1971, daughter Kate and son Andrew.
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