Mary Lindsay: paediatrician and psychiatrist who championed the right of parents to stay with their children in hospital
“If you take a sick child from its parents or nurse you break its heart immediately,” wrote physician George Armstrong in 1792. Mary Lindsay took these words to heart and throughout her seven decades as a paediatrician she campaigned for children staying in hospital to be accompanied by their parents. When she began practising in the early 1950s, visiting hours were severely restricted, based on misconceptions about infection and the belief that parental visits upset children. Lindsay observed the children, rather than relying on assumptions. She saw how they often experienced grief and trauma when left by their parents. Her attitude was frequently dismissed as nonsense by her colleagues, “who adapted to the noise [of the children crying] just as one might tune out a motorway,” and told parents their child had been “perfectly happy on the ward” after “settling down.”1 Over her life Lindsay wrote many academic papers, the last of which, Sick Children and their Parents, was published in
