Obituary for Child Psychiatrist Sula Wolff

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Dr Sula Wolff: child psychiatrist and author

Sula Wolff used to say that she grew up in Berlin as a “pavement child”, playing on the streets with the city’s urchins, and, as an only child herself, observing their behaviour with a fascination that never left her. It was this curiosity about the lives of others that informed her later work as a pioneer of child psychiatry in Britain. She combined her clinical expertise with an abiding curiosity about her subjects. Her surgery was not only lined with books, it had a sandpit in the corner. Every encounter with a child became, for her, a research project.

She was among the first in her field to identify and define the characteristics of children on the autistic spectrum, and to establish their genetic component. By studying both the environmental factors, such as early maternal deprivation, which led to emotional disturbances in children, as well as the hereditary element that informed their behaviour, she was able to categorise the different manifestations of the unusual child, which might range from severe autism to the milder Asperger’s syndrome, and which needed to be treated accordingly. Along with Professor Sir Michael Rutter, she is regarded as a key figure in the development of child psychiatry, and her seminal works, such as Children Under Stress and Loners: The Life Path of Unusual Children have become classics of their kind.

For all the expertise she developed, however, she never lost sight of the welfare of the child. As one of her colleagues put it: “She took children’s anxieties and difficulties seriously and taught never to underestimate the importance to the child of trying to see the world though their eyes. She helped children to be understood, and she helped parents to understand their children better, and, more often than not, to begin to understand their own childhoods.”

Sula Wolff was born in Berlin, the only daughter of Walther and Friedl Wolff, and brought up in the German town of Wetzlar. Her father was a patent lawyer, and her mother, from whom she inherited her strong aesthetic sense, was a stylish figure in the town, a maker and wearer of beautiful clothes. As a Jewish family in the 1930s, they were keenly aware of the threat to their existence, and when, in 1933, Walther was briefly apprehended by the Nazis he took an immediate decision to leave. He went ahead to find sanctuary in Britain, a country for which he had a deep admiration, while Sula and her mother followed, staying first with an aunt in Rotterdam, and then joining Walther to live in Hampstead, which was to be her parents’ home for the rest of their lives. There they harboured some fellow Jews, although many of their relatives were not as fortunate as they had been and perished in Nazi camps.

As a well-educated German girl, Wolff arrived in Britain already speaking English, and became a pupil at South Hampstead School for Girls, where her aptitude won her the top English prize, and, later, entry to Oxford University. The school was evacuated to Berkhamsted during the war — an experience she loved because, quartered mainly with Quaker families, she felt herself liberated from her somewhat constrained home life. She had long decided to be a doctor, and at Oxford studied medicine, working first at the Radcliffe, then later, as a postgraduate, in a burns unit in Liverpool before transferring to the Whittington Hospital in London, where she trained as a paediatrician alongside Dr Simon Yudkin, from whom she acquired a passion for equality of provision and the virtues of the NHS. The harrowing experience of seeing children treated for meningitis by having penicillin injected directly into their brain convinced her that she must do more for damaged children; later she would make a special study of those who had been born deformed by Thalidomide.

She went to the Maudsley Hospital, where she studied child psychiatry under the formidable psychiatrist Sir Aubrey Lewis, and deliberately took LSD to study its effects. There too she met her future husband, Henry Walton, later Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Edinburgh, a South African who had been invited to London by Lewis after he read his MD thesis on attempted suicide. When Walton returned to South Africa to work as head of psychiatry at Groote Schuur Hospital (he had been Christiaan Barnard’s best man), she went too. They married in Cape Town in 1957, and she went on to be the first child psychiatrist in the Cape.

Just as the Wolffs had fled Nazi oppression, so the Waltons found apartheid increasingly oppressive. In 1960 they left for the US to work as research fellows at Columbia and Brooklyn respectively. In 1962, Henry was invited back to Britain to be Professor of Psychiatry in Edinburgh, and Sula was appointed to the Royal Hospital for Sick Children, where she worked clinically in the NHS, later becoming senior registrar.

Although her husband was always sought out for jobs, she had to find them for herself. She was always modest about her abilities, but single-minded in what she wanted to do, which was to work with problem children and their families. She believed that early intervention was vital. The first sentence of her introduction to Children Under Stress, first published in 1969, read: “With rare exceptions, problem children are no different from other children.” Later, however, as her research work took her into the area of genetics, and hereditary conditions such as autism, she would modify that view, while never losing sight of the central humanity of the child with whom she was dealing. Her writing was always exceptionally clear, spare and elegant but rigorous, just as she herself was. Even in ordinary conversation, she would never let sloppy statements or ill-defined judgments pass. A series of clinical papers and books on various aspects of child psychiatry established her reputation as a seminal influence in the field. The chapter that she wrote in Loners on the schizoid personality of Ludwig Wittgenstein has been widely admired. Throughout her career she taught medical students, young psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers; she was one of the first to promote liberal visiting hours for parents with children in hospital. She was made Honorary Fellow of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Edinburgh, a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and of the Royal Society of Medicine.

Her long and loving relationship with her husband was founded on opposites: she was the restrained rationalist, he was the extrovert. She was an expert cook, regarding her immaculate, green-walled kitchen as her “laboratory”. She always refused help (“It’s because she’s an only child”, Henry would say if guests erred by attempting to carry out used dishes). What they shared was a love of art, and their extensive art collection, drawn from contemporary artists but also from China and Africa, filled their beautiful house at Blacket Place. It is now in the National Galleries of Scotland.

Shortly before her death, the Waltons moved into a smaller flat in Edinburgh, keeping only a small collection of their favourite works. She is survived by her husband; there were no children.

Dr Sula Wolff, child psychiatrist, was born on March 1, 1924, and died September 21, 2009, aged 85

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/com...cle6860723.ece


I am an admirer of Dr. Wolff's work.

Since I could not find a Pyschology/Psychiatry section, I decided to post here.