My friend Maggie Eisner, who has died aged 75, was a GP in Yorkshire who gave her utmost to her patients, her practice and to her young colleagues.
Within her practice in Shipley she established a service for home births in Bradford and led the GP training scheme, under which many cohorts of trainees benefited from her teaching. With patients she had a great personal touch, characterised by openness and a willingness to listen. For all of her work over the years she was honoured with a fellowship of the Royal College of General Practitioners.
Maggie was born in Cardiff to Jewish parents, Gisela, a Czech doctor, and Conrad, a Romanian lawyer, who had fled Czechoslovakia in 1939 and found refuge in Wales. Her father died while Maggie was studying at St Paul’s school for girls in London, to where the family had moved after the second world war.
Later she went to Somerville College, Oxford, studying medicine. She qualified as a doctor in 1972 and three years later joined her first GP practice in Lewisham, where she was part of a radical collective in which all staff took home exactly the same rate of pay whatever their position. After three years there she moved northwards and took over the practice in Shipley until her retirement in 2007, although she retained her involvement in the Bradford GP training scheme until 2015.
Throughout most of her time at the Shipley practice, Maggie sang with Bradford Women’s Singers, as well as the Bradford Festival Choral Society, of which she was chair. She helped to establish the Bradford Friendship Choir, a singing group for refugees and asylum seekers, and Bloomin’ Buds theatre company, which aimed to get working-class children interested in the stage.
In retirement she worked as a volunteer for Freedom from Torture, for whom she wrote a medico-legal guide for its staff and volunteers. She gardened annually at Lauriston community farm near Edinburgh, did ballroom dancing, was a brilliant Scrabble player and creative writer, and cross-country skied every year.
Maggie married Stephen Horsman, a primary school teacher, in 1986, and they had a daughter, Colleen. Both predeceased her.
