Sheridan began her medical career at the Liverpool Royal Infirmary and worked briefly in her father's practice before choosing to train as a paediatrician.[1] She worked as a resident medical officer in several Liverpool children's hospitals before moving to Cheshire to work as a public health officer.[2] She then moved to Manchester to work as an assistant school medical officer, where she noticed that children who had been diagnosed late with hearing, speech and visual impairments suffered in their education. She thought that, in order to diagnose these conditions earlier, a more thorough set of parameters for measuring children's development needed to be established. After the Second World War, having published several papers on speech delay and language delay, she was recruited by George Godber to join the children's department at the Ministry of Health. At the children's department, she authored numerous publications on child development, covering children's play, the link between hearing and speech development, and children with disabilities.[1] She wrote a seminal textbook, From Birth to Five Years, first written in 1960 and published under that title in 1973, which described the normal parameters of children's development to assist in the diagnosis of developmental disorders.[3]
