Mary Sheridan was born in Liverpool in 1899, the eldest daughter of a Liverpool Irish GP and a district nurse. From an early age she displayed an interest in medicine and was fortunate enough to obtain a scholarship to the University of Liverpool School of Medicine where she graduated with honours in 1923. After house jobs at Liverpool Royal Infirmary and a brief period as assistant in her father's practice, Dr. Sheridan chose to pursue a career in paediatrics.
Liverpool University was one of the first to admit women as medical students, however prejudice against women doctors was still strong and this fuelled Dr. Sheridan's early commitment to feminism. She worked as a resident medical officer in several Liverpool children's hospitals before moving to Cheshire to work as a public health offficer. She then moved to Manchester to work as a assistant school medical officer. It was here she first encountered the gross deprivation in the health, housing and education of many children from the poorer areas of the city. She was disturbed to find that the education of these children was being hampered by the late diagnosis of hearing, speech and visual handicaps. She thought that, in order to diagnose these conditions earlier, a more thorough set of parameters for measuring children's development needed to be established. From practical experience she found that the accepted tests of children's intelligence and maturation were in many ways inadequate. This drove her to discover for herself what the normal parameters of a child's development should be at different ages and how best to detect handicapping conditions in their earliest stages.
She continued her work in Manchester throughout the war becoming a senior school M.O. and publishing a number of papers on speech and language delay. Her expertise in the field of developmental paediatrics was recognized by Dr.George Godber, later Chief Medical Officer for England, and shortly after the war she was invited to join the children's department of the Ministry of Health.
At the children's department, she authored numerous publications on child development before the seminal work in 1960 for which she was to become famous: 'From Birth to Five Years: Children's Developmental Progress.' To facilitate early diagnosis Dr. Sheridan developed the STYCAR (Standard Tests for Young Children and the Retarded) which, in modified form, have remained in use in child health clinics and schools to the present. Her publications on child development are still widely used to train doctors, nurses and health visitors in clinics and hospitals. She was an early advocate of the screening of all infants and young children for potentially handicapping conditions and of the setting up of 'at-risk' registers.
She began working as a consultant paediatrician at Guy's Hospital in 1962 and retired from the Department of Health in 1964-the importance of her work being recognized by the award of an OBE alongside the James Spence Medal, the highest honor given by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health in 1968.
Although her mobility was increasingly hampered by arthritis, Dr. Sheridan continued to be active performing research and lecturing at Guy's Hospital, the Institute of Child Health and the Nuffield Speech and Language Unit and traveled extensively. It was shortly after giving a lecture in her beloved Dublin in 1978 that she collapsed and died at home of a sudden myocardial infarct.
Dr. Sheridan is recalled by the founding of a number of child developmental centres in her name-the first of which was at Guys Hospital. While outwardly somewhat forbidding in manner, Dr. Sheridan was a kindly woman , whom children trusted completely . She encouraged many (including your contributor) to pursue a medical, particularly paediatric, career. A doughty feminist she particularly championed the role of women in medicine and campaigned for feminism and women in medicine throughout her career.
The inscription of her name on the RSM's 'Wall of Honour' commemorates her pioneering work in child development and screening for handicapping conditions which remains influential to this day.
See also:- http://www.thefootballvoice.com/2020/08/a-liverpool-exemplar-john-archer.html?q=John+Archer
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