Consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist at Nottingham City Hospital 1965-1995.
Jean Lesley Baker, who died on 12 December 2025, was born in Winterton, North Lincolnshire on 10 September 1930, into a family of doctors. She went to a Quaker school in Ackworth, Pontefract and then to Penros College for Girls in Colwyn Bay.
She qualified from Sheffield in 1954, and began her career in general practice. Lesley began an OBGYN job at Mile End hospital, London, found her vocation, and switched career choice. After working at Norfolk & Norwich, and back in Sheffield, she gained her MRCOG in 1962. After a spell as a lecturer in Sheffield, she was appointed one of three consultants in Nottingham City Hospital with duties at Grantham, Mansfield and Newark, and supervision of many smaller GP and midwifery led units, as well as a 40% home delivery rate.
Lesley’s life was her work. She lived near the hospital, and on duty or not, came when called. All her successors remember her innumerable out of hours emergency notes. She never published an academic paper nor obtained a higher degree, preferring to lead and teach by example, a role model for a whole generation of doctors, whose careers she supported.
Retirement left a gap, which she filled with voluntary locums in Africa. Initially at St. Joseph's, a Roman Catholic mission Hospital, in Kitovu, Uganda, then at Dilla hospital in Ethiopia, and latterly at Jimma hospital, also in Ethiopia. Her work at Jimma led to many other links with Nottingham which persist to this day.
She was President of the Nottingham Medico-Chirurgical Society 1991-2 and a long- standing member of the Medical Women’s Federation (MWF). She never married, and when she bought her house in Nottingham the bank wanted a male guarantor for the mortgage.She fought that nonsense and won.
Towards the end of her career, in a talk to the MWF in Nottingham she revealed that during her training, she had received an offer of marriage. Her training advisors told her that a married woman would never be appointed a consultant obstetrician, she had to choose. She chose obstetrics.
Lesley cared for everyone in a precious way, her patients and their babies, the nursing staff, her friends,neighbours and generations of her wider family. She exemplified the ideal professional, caring for everyone apart from herself and her own comforts. Nothing was too much, her kindness was truly remarkable. She lived her life for others. She is and will be profoundly missed.