The obstetrician and gynaecologist Sir Anthony Alment, who has died aged 80, was influential in the 1970s in persuading his profession to recognise feminist dissatisfaction with women's healthcare. As honorary secretary and then president of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (1978-81), he was concerned with improved scientific care - as a young houseman he had pioneered continual foetal monitoring - and with helping women doctors to specialise.

He had reached the summit of his profession despite having no academic degree (at least not until Leicester University gave him an honorary doctorate on the eve of his retirement). For most of his career, he did not base himself in a big city or university town but in Northampton, where he was a consultant from 1960 to 1985.

Tony was the only son of a Watford GP, who had married a nurse he met in France during the first world war; he was educated at Marlborough College, where he enjoyed roaming Wiltshire with Richard Jefferies' books as a guide. He went to his father's old medical school at St Bartholomew's Hospital in Smithfield, London. When, in 1944, a V-1 flying bomb landed nearby, Alment and other student surgeons dealt with casualties for 36 hours without a break. He wrote:

It was quiet

After the motor of the flying bomb

Had stopped above

Little people in the streets below

Going about the day's civilian tasks. Studious days

When we sat with books by the fire

Until the shattering, unheralded roar

Brought days and nights of toil

Among the dusty living and the bloody dying,

Here at home.

He qualified in 1945, inclining towards obstetrics and gynaecology, and joined a surgical team in this specialisation, under such eminent teachers as Wilfred Shaw, John Howkins and Donald Fraser. Two years' national service as a medical officer in the RAF followed.

He took further training posts in Norwich, Northampton and London, at Queen Charlotte's and the Chelsea Hospital. From 1954 he returned to Bart's as last holder of the splendid old title "resident physician-accoucheur", involving much teaching. He did that well, but had no ambition to pursue it. He thought a busy district hospital would most satisfy him, and was happy to be consultant at the Barratt Maternity Hospital in Northampton.

There, he and his wife Elizabeth, whom he had married in 1946, bought their first - and only - home, in a village on the edge of town. Tony loved his work as long as he was in command and making the decisions, and was popular with colleagues and patients. He learned the importance of divining a woman's needs and fears, and treating her with understanding.

Though he maintained a small private practice until 1978, he passionately believed in the National Health Service, although not always admiring its political masters. He was a member of the regional health authority, and chairman of its medical advisory committee. From 1973 to 1976, he chaired the committee of inquiry into competence and practice set up by the British Medical Association. Its findings were dubbed the Alment Report.

His term of office as president of the Royal College covered the college's golden jubilee in 1979, a visit by the Queen, and a knighthood. He retired in 1985 at 63, which he thought late enough for an obstetrician.

He loved fly-fishing and took a pitch on the river Test each summer; he retained his love of wildlife and became a trustee of a nature reserve. He was a warden of his local church, and toiled to reclaim the overgrown yard of a ruined church. In his mid-70s he joined the bell-ringers and helped ring in the new millennium. In his workshop he repaired anything from church ornaments to engine parts for old cars. Always there was his discerning love of wine - he bought for the Royal College's cellars, and belonged to the Northampton wine and food society. When the broadcaster Robert Robinson visited the society, he was so impressed that he invited Alment on to Stop The Week on Radio 4. Tony hadn't grasped the necessary assertiveness needed to barge into the conversation, and did not become a regular.

He is survived by his wife.

· Edward Anthony John Alment, obstetrician and gynaecologist, born February 3 1922; died March 6 2002