Content note: the following text contains out-dated & problematic medical language. Thank you to the Heritage Fund & Sylvia Waddilove Foundation for supporting our research and development of the Unreachable musical.
Dr Mary Dorothy Sheridan OBE was born in 1899 in the Victorian era, and lived through two world wars before starting her work for the Ministry of Health and the newly founded NHS.
She was one of six children in an Irish Catholic family: the eldest daughter of a Liverpool GP and district nurse working near the Liverpool docks.
She won a scholarship to the University of Liverpool School of Medicine, graduated in 2023 and went on to become a “schools’ doctor” in Salford where she witnessed the impact of poverty on public health. She became frustrated with the lack of accurate tests to measure child development, hearing and speech, and how opportunities were being missed to help children.
In the 1920s many medics became interested in eugenics and how health was linked to genes, but Mary was interested in social factors and how the growing brain could be supported to thrive through stimuli and affection, children being allowed to be children, something she later described as the right “climate of feeling”.
“The largest section of children in long term hospital care are those in Mental Deficiency Hospitals”
When awareness grew of Dr Mary’s innovative tests she was invited to become a medical inspector at the Ministry of Health under Chief Medical Officer Dr Godber, one of the architects of the NHS. Between 1947 and 1962 she visited tens of “Training Centres” for “Subnormal Children” and “Mental Deficiency Hospitals” for children with Learning Disabilities. At the time, labels such as “subnormal”, “untrainable”, “unreachable”, “disturbed” were standard medical terminology.
Dr Sheridan did not drive and travelled the length and breadth of the country from Inverness to St Just in Cornwall on British Rail. During the latter part of this period she was in her sixties and suffering from arthritis. She wrote extensive “informal inspection reports”, letters of concern and speeches, which record her exhaustive efforts to upskill institutionalised doctors, matrons and nurses in more progressive methods and to raise the alarm about the “shattering” conditions for many of the children in the hospitals. She was not afraid of speaking her mind.
“Young children may reside permanently in Mental Deficiency hospitals whether or not they have been psychologically assessed”
Dr Mary Sheridan was a staunch feminist and talented playwright. She wrote three plays stored at The Liverpool Rep, but unfortunately, they burned with the theatre during the Liverpool Blitz. In her youth the male population was decimated by the First World War, and she never married. She spoke out about long stay “Mental Deficiency Hospitals for Children”, about how they were insufficiently regulated, how they isolated and deprived disabled children, many of whom were separated from family and admitted at an early age without proper assessment, never to be reassessed.
By observing, photographing and testing children she met in these institutions she was able to map developmental milestones. She founded the first of many child development centres at Guys Hospital and wrote the seminal book Birth to Five. Dr Sheridan was awarded the James Spence Medal in 1968, ten years before her death of a heart attack in 1978. A few years later, in the 1980’s, most long stay hospitals were finally closed.
Mary D. Sheridan’s full biography by her nephew Dr Gervase Hamilton, as recorded on the Royal Society of Medicine Wall of Honour, can be read here.
The informal inspection reports
The National Archive in Kew holds the reports written by Dr Mary Sheridan on her lengthy nationwide tour. They are full of her annotations and vivid, compassionate descriptions of the children and staff she met. Although the children’s names are redacted, many will still be alive today. The reports are a chilling reminder of what was considered acceptable only a few decades ago, but they also pinpoint failures that remain unresolved today:
– Lack of integration for children with communication difficulties
– Lack of stimulating age-appropriate opportunities for young people in their late teens (now known as the “cliff edge”)
– Ongoing stigma of learning disability
– Problem of overprotectiveness and trauma in parents
– Staff churn and unevenness of training for carers
– Lack of standardisation in special education settings
– Lack of aspiration
– The life-changing difference made by committed and responsive staff
Mary D. Sheridan’s inspection reports are an important time capsule: they help us understand the ideas and systems that have informed the way provision is set up today, they remind us of the dangers of repeating history, and they spotlight how much progress is still needed.
Dr. Sheridan’s name is not well known, but her inspections, tests, and revolutionary research transformed disability provision and arguably formed the basis for many of our parenting and play-based learning ideas today.