My father, John Pippard, who has died aged 93, was a consultant psychiatrist whose humane approach helped many patients and inspired a generation of trainee doctors.
The son of Sutton Pippard, professor of civil engineering at Imperial College London, and his wife, Olive (nee Tucker), John was born in London, but the family moved to Cardiff and then Bristol with his father's academic appointments. His younger brother, Brian, became a professor of physics, but John was always drawn to biology.
He went to Clifton college, Bristol, then studied natural sciences at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and trained to be a doctor at the London hospital. He was appointed consultant psychiatrist at Claybury hospital, Woodford Bridge, Essex, in 1955. There he played a lead part in the pioneering transformation of a traditional mental hospital into a therapeutic community, where all staff and patients were involved in a non-hierarchical approach to therapeutic decisions.
He spoke at Claybury's centenary in 1993, when his reflections encapsulated his Quaker outlook: "I suspect that if you want to develop a therapeutic community it is desirable to be an optimist and to be temperamentally disposed to seeing the best in others, so that despite disappointments and setbacks cheerfulness is always breaking in."
After retirement in 1979 John became a research fellow at the Royal College of Psychiatrists, undertaking a survey of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) that was the first comprehensive national assessment of any widely used treatment. That his critical report in 1981 was favourably received by psychiatrists and did not lead to public rejection of this treatment owed much to his personal standing, and to advice from Malcolm Dean, the social affairs editor of the Guardian, who was on the steering committee. John was subsequently in great demand to give talks and advice.
He was practical and determined. When in his 70s he fell from his loft, fracturing his shoulder, he was told he would never play his cello again. His response was to construct a pulley over a door frame so that he could passively raise his arm: eventually he regained full movement and resumed playing chamber music at home. His garden, tended with his wife Kathleen, a family planning doctor whom he had married in 1947, was a joy to him and his visitors, but he knew when it was time to leave and spent his last two years contentedly at Quaker House, a residential home in New Milton, Hampshire.
Kathleen died in 2005. He is survived by four children, Andrew, David, Clare and me, nine grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.