Sylvia Annette Meakin Hatfield (née Herford) was unusual in her generation in being the daughter of a woman doctor. She and her husband, Ted, worked as family doctors in Ongar for nearly 40 years. They both had a particular interest in the psychological aspects of medicine and had met when they were both training to be psychiatrists in 1939. They used to go to the Tavistock Clinic, where Michael Balint, a Hungarian psychoanalyst, worked with groups of GPs to understand the interrelationship of psyche and soma. Sylvia did much maternity work, delivering babies in people’s homes. Family planning was an important part of her work and was linked to her strong social conscience and belief in …