BRITSH MEDICAL JOURNAL, Obituary, Jan 29, 1966

AUGUSTA U. LANDMAN, M.B., CH.B. Dr. Augusta U. Landman, a medical practitioner whose special interest lay in family planning, died at her home in London on 14 January. She was 72. Augusta Umanski Landman was born in 1893 and graduated M.B., Ch.B. from Leeds University in 1915. Her early appointments included those of senior resident medical officer to Leeds Public Dispensary, assistant tuberculosis officer to Leeds Corporation Sanatorium and Dispensary, and assistant medical officer to Firvale Hospital, Sheffield. Her interest soon turned to marriage guidance and family planning, and she was appointed medical officer to the Hampstead and Willesden Family Planning Centre and consultant to the London Marriage Guidance Council and to the North Kensington Marriage Welfare Centre. She leaves a husband and five children.

S. R. B. writes: Augusta Landman's keen humanitarian interest and understanding soon led her to search for deeper social and psychological causes underlying physical ills. Child guidance was one of her first special interests and she was among the founders of the Northwest Child Guidance Clinic. A lecture by Keynes in the 1920s awakened her interest in marriage guidance and family planning. She was one of the founders of the London Marriage Guidance Council and later its honorary consultant, toiling up the three flights of stairs to the old Duke Street premises many times a week. One of her special concerns was the creation and training of counsellors. She finally made family planning her own special field and became medical officer of clinics at Guildford, Islington, and Hampstead. When she retired three years ago she became senior medical officer to the Hampstead clinic.

Dr. Landman's outstanding characteristic was her human kindness, immeasurable in breadth or depth. She was no saint but a dear human person subject to human foibles, and therefore the more understanding of these in other people. Her fight for years against pain from arthritis never diminished her care and attention towards patients, family, friends, strangers-far beyond any claims of profession or friendship. She never spared herself, and received patients for counselling up to two days before her final collapse. She leaves an uncommonly large circle to mourn her loss.