Mary Sheridan
English paediatrician and public health officer
Mary Dorothy Sheridan, OBE, FFCM (1899 – 14 February 1978) was an English paediatrician and public health officer who pioneered the study of child development.
Biography
Mary Sheridan was born in Liverpool in 1899. Her father was an Irish general practitioner and her mother was a district nurse. She earned a scholarship to attend the University of Liverpool School of Medicine, graduating in 1922.
Sheridan began her medical career at the Liverpool Royal Infirmary and worked briefly in her father's practice before choosing to train as a paediatrician. She worked as a resident medical officer in several Liverpool children's hospitals before moving to Cheshire to work as a public health officer. She then moved to Manchester to work as an assistant school medical officer, where she noticed that children who had been diagnosed late with hearing, speech and visual impairments suffered in their education. 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. After the Second World War, having published several papers on speech delay and language delay, she was recruited by George Godber to join the children's department at the Ministry of Health. At the children's department, she authored numerous publications on child development, covering children's play, the link between hearing and speech development, and children with disabilities.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mary Sheridan” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.