My wife, Ruth Freeman, who has died aged 67 of breast cancer, was a researcher, author, and teacher in dental public health. Unusually, she was also a practising psychoanalytic psychotherapist. In her public health role, much of her work focused on people being unable to access the dental care they needed.
Born in Glasgow, Ruth was the daughter of Joan (nee Goldblatt), a medical social worker, and Tom Freeman, a renowned psychoanalyst. Her formative years were spent at the groundbreaking Demonstration School, Dundee, where children were taught through a series of projects. After then attending Belfast Royal Academy, she began her dental training at Queen’s University Belfast, qualifying in 1974. After a master’s in dental public health at University College London, she returned to Queen’s as a lecturer and began her research in health promotion, working partly with young children frightened of the dentist. She was appointed the first female professor at Queen’s dental school in 2000.
Ruth trained in psychotherapy with her father and practised from the family home in Antrim.
In 2006 she became professor of dental public health research at the University of Dundee. Here her focus was on minority groups without easy access to dental care. She developed two nationally funded Scottish government programmes to improve the oral health of homeless people and those in prison. The work is continuing. She also set up her own psychotherapy practice at her home in Newport.
Ruth was a member of the British Psychoanalytic Council and a fellow of the Faculty of Public Health, Royal College of Physicians (UK). These overlapping interests motivated her focus on the needs of minority care groups. Drawn to the work of Anna Freud on children and adolescents, Ruth edited Anna Freud: Selected Writings (1998) for Penguin Classics, with Richard Ekins as her co-editor.
Ruth possessed the unusual qualities of making research fun and engaging both for her colleagues and the people she sought to help. She also wrote many books, including Psychology of Dental Patient Care: the Common-sense Approach (2000); Preparing for Dental Practice (2004), with Trevor Burke; and Communication in General Practice (2006).
She had recently written papers for an international research group on the social exclusion of many people through economic, political, cultural and individual factors. She was concerned that too many were not getting the oral healthcare that they needed, not only in developing but also developed societies. She had also completed a paper for the BMJ about emotional exhaustion in Scottish dental staff. She retired from her own practice in April and from the University of Dundee in August.
Outside her work, she was interested in gardening, pottery and pen-and-ink illustration.
Ruth and I first met at a dental conference in London and eventually married in 2014. She is survived by her brother, Robert, and me.
