Paula Salmons: psychiatrist who established eating disorder service in Birmingham and warned against social pressure on women and girls to be thin

In the early 1980s a well dressed woman in high heels entered a police station in Birmingham. She had come to see a police officer who had become violent and had had to be restrained by colleagues. He was now locked in one of his own cells.

On her arrival she was asked, “Where’s the psychiatrist?”

Paula Salmons responded, “I am the psychiatrist.”

Women were then in the minority in psychiatry and Salmons was used to facing prejudice. Having married during her third clinical year at Birmingham Medical School, she had her first child, Graham, just after taking her finals. She was told on numerous occasions to go home and become a full time mother.

Back at the police station, a few officers were preparing to accompany her into the cell but she insisted on going in alone. She emerged unharmed. Her patient, she said, was “just very upset.”

By the mid-1980s, having practised both child and adult psychiatry, Salmons was a senior lecturer at the University of Birmingham and was becoming known for her work in the field of eating disorders.

This relatively untrodden path may have been dictated in part by an interest in society’s influence on the individual—she was a keen reader of social commentators such as Dickens, Trollope, and Hardy. Moreover, it was a challenge. In a 1987 article for the Midland Journal …