Introduction

The extract below is an edited version of Dr Lindsay’s presidential address—entitled ‘Listening and Reflecting’—to the paediatric section of the Royal Society of Medicine in October 1989. Mary Lindsay qualified in medicine in 1951 and, as Dermod MacCarthy’s paediatric registrar, appeared in James Robertson’s influential film ‘Going to hospital with mother’.1 2 Later, as a consultant child psychiatrist, she worked again with Dr MacCarthy and his patients, pioneering the model of liaison work described in this lecture. In 1976, Dr Lindsay, although a child psychiatrist working in the home counties, was elected to the British Paediatric Association, and in 1993 elected FRCP, something of an honour. In 1974, she and Dr MacCarthy started the celebrated child psychiatry/paediatric meetings at the postgraduate centre at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, which took place three times a year and continued for 18 years.

Mary Lindsay has been a distinguished presence at the interface of paediatrics and psychiatry for six decades, with many lectures and publications to her name, from 1955 to the present day. In an early BMJ paper following up children with coeliac disease, she noted how chronic disease slows the child’s development.3 From her medical beginnings as a junior paediatrician, she has championed the cause of a child’s right to have parental visits and overnight stays. Mary is currently completing a study of the changing history of parents’ access to their hospitalised children over three centuries.

The work reported here took place while Dr Lindsay was for almost 20 years an Honorary Consultant Child Psychiatrist in the paediatric department at the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, where, at his request, she joined the diabetic clinic of the late Professor David Baum and then his successor Dr (now Professor) David Dunger, sitting in with the paediatrician and taking part where appropriate. The crucial condition …