Mary Mason Jones

Doctor

DR MARY Mason Jones, who has died at 96, was a medical officer whose work on the menopause inspired the creation of the hormone replacement therapy clinic at the Leeds General Infirmary.

Born on Christmas Day in 1923 in Bareilly, India, while her father was serving with the Indian Army, she won a scholarship to the Royal School, Bath, where she captained the hockey and cricket teams and played Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

She grew up separated for long periods from her parents, who were still in India, and lost her brother, David, an RAF pilot, on Malta during the war.

After service with the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the women’s branch of the Army, she studied at the London School of Economics, and placed second in her first-year exams out of 400 students. She spent her 1946 summer holiday as a volunteer on the Yugoslav Youth Railway project, and left LSE after a year to pursue a career in medicine, starting at the Medical School of the London Hospital (now the Royal London) in 1947.

After qualifying in 1952, she moved North to take up her first house appointment at St James’s Hospital, and married Denis, a Leeds architect, in 1954. They were together for 56 years.

In 1958 she was awarded the Diploma of Psychological Medicine, sitting the exam while her week-old daughter was in the care of the St James’s maternity ward. She was subsequently appointed medical officer to the children’s home at Bramhope.

In 1972 Professor Christopher Nordin invited her to join the menopause research unit at the Leeds Infirmary, and her work there was the inspiration for her longrunning – and for many women, life-changing – hormone clinic.

It sparked her interest in osteoporosis and her membership of the National Osteoporosis Society, and for many years she raised money for bone scanners, shaking tins at the entrance to Sainsbury’s and Morrisons. She was vicepresident of the Leeds branch from 1989 and its chair from 1995 until she retired in 2002.

She is survived by four children, nine grandchildren and three great grandchildren.